A squirrel shut down holiday shoppers at the University Mall in South Burlington this morning, dimming sales and playing the Grinch on the first Saturday in December.
Power was off at the mall from about 7:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. after a squirrel scampered into Green Mountain Power equipment at a substation on Dorset Street and triggered the outage. Along with commercial users, about 5,000 residential customers in the city were without power for some or all of the morning in neighborhoods along Dorset Street, Spear Street, Hinesburg Road and Williston Road.