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14,000 Are Without Power All Thanks To A Crow

crow_phone.png
Ominous... (Photo by tallin via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr)
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Crows often get a bad rap. Sometimes they're seen as a harbinger of bad luck. Other times they symbolize death. And once in a while they'll even fly into a 34,500-volt circuit breaker and leave 14,000 residents without power for hours, which is exactly what happened today in the Valley Village area, reports the L.A. Times.

The outage happened at around 8:40 a.m., when Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's Distributing Station 57 experienced an equipment failure, according to KTLA. When a crew arrived at the station they found that a crow had been responsible for the malfunction.

According to the Times, outages of this scope are often solved quickly. But, due to complications, the crew had to bring in a remote transformer called a "hog wagon" to help restore the power. Initially the department said that it could take up to 10 hours to restore full power. As of 2:43 p.m., 13,500 residents were still without power:

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Hopefully, this isn't the beginning to something truly awful:

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