Power outages affected thousands of people in North Little Rock and downtown Little Rock over the course of Saturday, coming after a storm with heavy rain moved through Central Arkansas in the morning.
North Little Rock had two large power outages that affected roughly 2,600 customers, according to the North Little Rock Electric Department's outage map just before noon.
The department said in a tweet around 11:15 a.m. that two electric poles were broken and spans of wire were down due to fallen trees. A lineman had been dispatched, an earlier tweet said.
"Unfortunately, some customers will experience an extended outage while we repair the damaged infrastructure," the department said in the tweet.
"We have isolated the outage & restored power to as many customers as possible," the department tweeted around 12:40 p.m. "Due to conditions, terrain, & the amount of damage, customers currently without power will experience an extended outage while we repair the infrastructure."
At 6 p.m, the department's outage map indicated that about 2,000 customers remained without power.
The National Weather Service in North Little Rock didn't have any record of weather that could have knocked down power poles since about 7 p.m. Friday night.
Another large outage occurred roughly five hours after first, across the river in downtown Little Rock, and was caused by a bird.
According to Entergy Arkansas, the outage was first reported at 2:06 p.m. and affected 1,652 customers, primarily around the MacArthur Park district.
Power was restored by 4:50 p.m.
Matt Ramsey, an Entergy spokesperson, said a bird had gotten into an insulator, which is "part of one of the main breaker stations ... which makes sure that the wires don't touch.
"If you touch one of those, it will trip the breaker, and what happened is that bird ended up flying into that, and that's what tripped the breaker."
Ramsey said, "This type of thing happens a lot, to be honest with you. It's out of our control."
The power outage affected the newly opened Arkansas Museum of Fine Art.
The museum postponed a Member Day reception that had been scheduled for Saturday night. In a social media post, the museum said anyone with a ticket for the postponed reception can attend today's reception, scheduled for 12-5 p.m.