PORTLAND, Ore. — Just over 33,000 customers briefly lost power in Northeast Portland Wednesday afternoon due to what Pacific Power later explained was an incident in which a beaver chewed through a tree and caused it to fall and damage a power transmission line.
The utility provider first announced the outage on social media a little after 4 p.m., stating that the cause was under investigation and there was no immediate estimate for when power would be restored.
Pacific Power's outage map showed scattered outages around Northeast Portland Wednesday afternoon, mostly centered around the Woodlawn and Concordia neighborhoods. The map appeared to show the utility making progress on fixing the outage, with many pockets of affected customers disappearing between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.
It wasn't until around 5:30 p.m. that Pacific Power told KGW that the culprit had been a beaver and confirmed that all power had been restored. The incident happened in North Portland near the Columbia Slough, according to Pacific Power, which also shared pictures of the downed tree.
This isn't the first time a beaver has had a problematic encounter with electrical infrastructure in Oregon; in 2021, a beaver started a brush fire near Multnomah Falls when it weakened a tree that then fell over in the wind, landing on a power line and sparking the blaze.
The impact of Wednesday's outage appeared to be widespread, if brief; the Portland Bureau of Transportation retweeted Pacific Power and warned drivers to treat traffic signals without power as four-way stops, but did not make it clear if any traffic lights in the area had actually lost power.
The Portland Streetcar account also tweeted at around 5 p.m. that service on the A and B Loop lines was suspended due to a power outage on the Broadway Bridge, although it's not clear if that's connected to the Pacific Power outage — the bridge appears be right on the dividing line between the Pacific Power and Portland General Electric service areas, according to service maps from the two providers.
Most of Portland and the metro area south of the Columbia River is served by Portland General Electric, but Pacific Power serves most of the northeast portion of the city between Interstates 5 and 205.
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