SOUTH FORSYTH — Reindeer should be the animal of the week.

Instead — or at least for a morning — they were replaced by a squirrel, whose climbing escapade triggered power outages for nearly 6,000 people.

Outages of between one and two hours were reported Tuesday morning in areas of south Forsyth and northern Fulton and western Gwinnett counties, according to Blake House, vice president of member services for Cumming-based Sawnee EMC.

According to House, a squirrel found its way into a substation, climbed onto a breaker and knocked it and the power out.

As of about lunchtime Tuesday, a Sawnee EMC outage map showed 2,380 outages in Forsyth, or 3 percent of the county’s customers, with a total of 5,815 reported.

The fate of the squirrel could not immediately be determined.