Snakes cause thousands in Rock Hill to lose power

Two black snakes crawled into a power transformer Friday afternoon in Rock Hill, causing an outage to 6,000 customers, officials said.

The outage was reported at 2:15 p.m., and power was restored at 3 p.m.

"I imagine it did cause a bit of a ruckus, everyone scrambling," said resident Tomi Hendry.

Many reported outages at businesses, homes and busy intersections in Rock Hill, including Mount Gallant at Anderson Road.

City officials tweeted they were overwhelmed with calls from people reporting outages in the area.

A spokesperson with Duke Energy said most outages are caused by trees and severe weather, but small animals often cause outages as well.

In some areas, crews put down a guard to prevent animals from crawling into transformers, but officials say it won't prevent every case.

While shocked to hear the cause of outages Friday, longtime resident Michele Husted said the city has dealt with this problem before.

"When we first moved to Rock Hill in '95, we had a couple summers when we were having serial outages, and we found out it was snakes," she said.

The outage was reported at 2:15 p.m. and was restored by 3 p.m.

One snake died and a line technician caught the other one.

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