Parts of a city in Palm Beach County went without power for several hours Wednesday due to a large-scale outage caused by an iguana.
NBC affiliate WPTV-TV is reporting that the city of Lake Worth Beach tweeted Wednesday morning that the animal caused a substation outage, cutting power to customers in the southeast area of the city.
The outage affected nearly 1,500 customers, according to city spokesman Ben Kerr. He added that the city has been working to remedy wildlife problems after three separate incidents involving iguanas.
“It’s down 50% from last year,” Kerr said. “And that has to do with us having a lot of security measures in place to try and stop it.
The problem with iguanas is that they’re so big, they practically go over the lines.”
Jason Bailey, deputy director of operations for the Lake Worth Beach system, said power was restored within 35 minutes.
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officials said the green iguanas are not native to the state and can also cause damage to residential and commercial landscape vegetation.
