Helium balloons blamed for Everett power outage

Helium party balloons are being blamed for a brief power outage that hit downtown Everett over the weekend.

Snohomish County Public Utility District spokesman Bob Bolerjack says it doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while Mylar balloons can hit power lines and cause a connection that shuts off the circuits.

“It happens a few times a year. It’s sort of a self protection mechanism for the circuit.”

The outage affected about 1,000 customers.

Bolerjack says officials aren’t sure of the source of another outage on Saturday morning that left around 3,000 customers without power for about 45 minutes.

“Normally you would find a limb on a line or something like that and they scouted the whole thing and couldn’t determine what happened there.”