Nature’s little mischief maker — the squirrel — was the cause of Saturday’s widespread power outage in New Westminster.

Apparently, the critter entered the city’s main substation, causing outages for several neighbourhoods.

B.C. Hydro spokesperson Mora Scott said while New Westminster has its own utility, B.C. Hydro electricians were sent to the substation to investigate.

“They determined the outage was caused by a squirrel contacting equipment in the substation,” she said in an email Saturday.

The city says on its website that the Queen’s Park Sportsplex was temporarily evacuated because of the outage.

Shortly after 9 a.m., the city said due to an outage at a main substation, a large scale power outage was affecting the neighbourhoods of Sapperton, Glenbrook North, and Queen’s Park

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