Bird Blamed for Power Outage

About 8,000 Thousand Oaks residents awoke to an electrical power outage Friday morning after a bird tangled with power lines, causing one line to short out and fall across both sides of the Ventura Freeway, officials said.

A bird about the size of a crow apparently perched on a power line along the freeway at Hampshire Road and caused the wire to ignite and fall across the freeway at 5:48 a.m., said Carol Larsen, area manager of the Southern California Edison Company. No vehicles were hit and there were no injuries, she said.

Larsen said 8,460 customers in Thousand Oaks were without power from half an hour to two hours. About 300 customers in the Old Town region of Thousand Oaks were without power until 12:30 p.m., Larsen said.

Edison employees, on their way to work at the Edison office a block from where the wire went down, pulled over on the freeway and began warning people away from the wire, although it was dead when it touched the ground, Larsen said.

“We always treat a power line as if it were live,” she said, adding that every wire has a safety feature that cuts off electricity immediately. “They were telling people to leave the wire alone.”

Freeway traffic was stopped for a few minutes in both directions while an Edison crew removed the line, she said.

Larsen said wires downed by birds is “reasonably common.

“Birds sit on the wires all the time,” she said. “Sometimes a part of their body, like a wing, touches an insulator or another wire, causing the electricity to flow through them instead of the wire.”