A seagull hit a power line this morning, causing an outage on Treasure Island that lasted for about 45 minutes, a spokesman for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission said.
When power went out throughout the island about 10:20 a.m., an SFPUC crew was sent to the scene and determined that the bird had hit the line, triggering a power surge that flipped a breaker, SFPUC spokesman Charles Sheehan said.
The crew resolved the problem, and power was restored at 11:05 a.m.
“It is not uncommon for animals to trip off the breakers, shutting off power,” Sheehan said.
James Mairena, a cashier at the Treasure Island MiniMart & Deli, said that he had to close the store during the outage because the cash register was out. He said he only had to turn away a few customers.
“There have been a decent number of power outages here, each month, since they started working on the bridge,” Mairena said. “Last month we had one.”
He was referring to the Bay Bridge, where construction is under way on a new eastern span.
Neighboring Yerba Buena Island was not affected by the outage, Sheehan said.
Jeff Burbank, Bay City News
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