A large portion of the City of Piedmont experienced a long-lasting power-outage on Saturday which may not seem unusual; however it was the cause of the outage that has everyone including the mayor scratching their heads.

According to Piedmont Mayor Bill Baker a squirrel got in the substation at Jacks and caused damage to the regulators.

We have been told the damage was in excess of $20,000; it took Electric Department Crews several hours to repair the substation and restore the power.

Mayor Baker said Power was off to half the town for several hours or more and wanted to praise the Electrical Dept who worked very hard to restore power.