Update at 8:00 p.m. December 5:
Power was finally restored to all areas of the USF Tampa campus shortly after 7 p.m.
Update at 6:20 p.m. December 5:
Tampa Electric reported that power was restored to all customers shortly after 6 p.m., but Adam Freeman from USF Communications & Marketing tells WUSF portions of the Tampa campus remain in the dark.
While the entire campus wasn't affected, staff and students were asked to leave the Marshall Student Center and the Library, which still had no power as of 6:20 p.m. In addition, some traffic light outages have been reported.
Original post at 5:44 p.m. December 5:
In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, it's deja vu all over again.
For the second day in a row, power has been disrupted to the University of South Florida campus in Tampa, along with some surrounding customers - and Tampa Electric is blaming squirrels.
Power went out around 4:15 this afternoon. Just before 5 p.m., Tampa Electric tweeted:
We are attempting to switch the 7,120 Customers in the USF area of Tampa to other electrical sources over the next 2 hours.
— Tampa Electric (@TampaElectric) December 5, 2014
A short time later, they tweeted:
The USF outage was caused by a squirrel in the electrical substation.
— Tampa Electric (@TampaElectric) December 5, 2014
A similar squirrel-caused incident knocked out power for much of the same area Thursday morning for about an hour.
Classical WSMR 89.1 and 103.9 were knocked off the air by the outage. WUSF 89.7 is on the air as usual.
We'll update this story when we have more information--if the squirrels don't finish us off first.
