An animal, probably a squirrel, tangled with utility equipment in a Buckhead substation Monday afternoon and paid the ultimate price.

The animal was too burned to identify, but a Georgia Power spokesman said it looked kind of like a squirrel and he blamed it for the 18-minute outage that struck the area around 3:45 p.m.

"An animal got into equipment," utility spokesman Jeff Wilson said. "Indications are it was a squirrel."

There was no immediate count on the number of customers who lost power, but Wilson said office towers and MARTA were affected. He said at 4:40 p.m. that power was restored to MARTA but that the transit agency was still working to bring its equipment back online.

A MARTA spokeswoman said a "central control outage" was causing 15-minute delays on the lines going through Buckhead to both North Springs and Doraville. But the spokeswoman, Cara Hodgson, said the problem was not connected to the power outage.

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