More than 33-thousand people in Natomas were without power today.
Chris Capra with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District says a mylar balloon may be at fault, "When they float into power lines they can cause outages simply because they interrupt the circuits. What is believed to have happened here was those mylar balloons got into the actual substation and caused a very large outage."
The first outage was reported at about 2 o'clock. Service was restored a little more than an hour later.
SMUD urges anyone with this type of balloon at a party to make
sure the balloon is tied down.
The utility does not track the number of balloon-related
outages it suffers each year.