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Bird to blame for Sunday power outage
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The smell of roasted buzzard cut the air Sunday night in the Lucky community, the foul fowl plunging the area into darkness when it short circuited the electrical grid.“I’d estimate we had about 800 customers affected,” said Danny Sutton, director of operations for Caney Fork Electric. “It happened around 5 p.m. We were able to restore power in about an hour and a half.”Sutton said the culprit for the blackout that caused Titans fans to miss the end of the team’s 51-28 thrashing by the Broncos was a large buzzard that made a wrong step on one of the lines in the Lucky area. The short circuit threw hundreds of customers in the Lucky, Vinson’s Crossroads, Blues Hill, Newtown and Centertown areas into darkness.Caney Fork linemen replaced the fuse only to find out something was happening on the line when they tested it.“We had a customer tell us there was fire coming from one of the poles,” Sutton said, noting that was when linemen located the well-roasted buzzard still on the pole.Sutton said that despite freezing rain and other weather-related threats, it is usually animals which cause outages.“We put up animal stops the best we can, but sometimes they are still able to get in there,” Sutton said, noting they even have a fake redtail hawk stationed at one area where animals were bad about getting into the lines.