An equipment failure Saturday kept Ballinger neighborhood in the dark

An early morning power failure on Saturday, December 26, 2020 meant that 3,700 households centered in Shoreline's Ballinger neighborhood were in the dark and cold most of the day.

According to a City Light spokesperson, 

"It was an equipment failure. It was not a transformer, as people on social media surmised, but a sectionalizer, which is a protective device that automatically isolates a faulted section of line from the rest of the distribution system."

The power went out about 6am and was restored about five hours later.

The photo shows three sectionalizers on a utility pole, courtesy of the webpage Fundamentals of Electricity.