BIDDEFORD — No phones were ringing and no lights were shining in City Hall late Thursday morning, after a power outage left nearly 6,000 Central Maine Power customers in Biddeford and Saco in the dark.

“Essentially we have nothing running,” City Manager John Bubier said at 10:30 a.m., paying close attention to his waning cell phone battery.

“If this dies, I’m going to have to go out to my car to charge it,” he said.

Despite being less than a mile away from the electrical substation where the outage originated, Biddeford High School retained power throughout the blackout, said Bubier, which lasted about an hour and a half. The Biddeford Police Department didn’t lose power either.

Power outages are par for the course for Mainers. But unlike most of them, Thursday’s wasn’t caused by power lines caked in ice, high-speed winds or heavy snow. Instead, the culprit was of the small, hairy, four-legged variety ”“ a squirrel gone rogue in the mess of high-voltage metal.

“The cause of the outage was a squirrel that entered some equipment at the May Street substation in Biddeford,” Gail Rice, a spokeswoman for CMP, said over the phone on Thursday. “The squirrel got into some energized equipment there and caused some damage.”

The outage was reported at 9:45 a.m., she said, and by 11:10 a.m., power was restored to all of the roughly 5,667 CMP customers who had lost it. According to CMP’s website, there are 21,352 CMP customers in Biddeford and Saco.

In October of last year, a similar, squirrel-related incident left more than 6,200 CMP customers in Lewiston without power for about an hour.

Just before 11 a.m. about a half dozen CMP trucks were parked on the scene, at the corner of May Street and Colonial Drive in Biddeford. Several workers huddled in hard-hats behind the fence marking the entrance to the substation.

“We’re getting everyone back on,” shouted one of them.

— Staff Writer Angelo J. Verzoni can be contacted at 282-1535, ext. 329 or [email protected].