Last night was one of those odd nights... I was sitting in my garage, talking to my neighbor and all of a sudden I see a flash of light to the east. It almost looked like as if lightning struck. As soon as I saw the flash it all went black. The entire neighborhood was dark. Neighbors started coming out of their houses to see if it was only their homes... It wasn't.

Matt Sparx
Matt Sparx
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The eerie feeling of darkness was only multiplied by the sounds of silence and then what we assume was fireworks. However, I am pretty sure some of them were gunshots. All of Johnstown from I 25 down Highway 60 and all of Milliken was dark.

At about 10:30 p.m. I checked the power outage map on Xcel Energy. The map showed that over 6,000 people were affected by the outage. Xcel also said on their site that the power wouldn't be restored until about 12:45 a.m.... Great.

I headed to bed and just as I started dozing off, all electrical hell in the house breaks loose! The washer restarts the interrupted spin cycle, all of the lights that were on in the house at the time of the outage come to life and the most startling of them all... The box fan that was in the window to dissipate the smoke from my cooking kicks on with all of its glory and slams to the floor. Thankfully the power was back on. Thankfully I didn't have to pee as well, because all of the ruckus caused by the restart.

So, what caused this power outages that affected at least two towns in Weld County? A snake! A stupid little snake. According to the Johnstown Breeze, a snake looking for warmth on a hot summer's night found its way into an Xcel substation in Johnstown causing the havoc of the power outage. The snake's actions caused a fire in which Xcel crews and Front Range Fire and Rescue had to put out before repairs could be done.

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All in all, it made for an interesting night!

 

 

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