A snake short-circuited power to about 400 homes and businesses in Owen Brown village Thursday for up to 34 minutes, and a nest of serpents may have been responsible for brief outages over the previous week, a Baltimore Gas & Electric spokesman said.

"The theory now is that all of this may have been caused by a snake's nest down near this underground equipment," said utility spokesman John Metzger. "We're not certain of that and plan to do some testing on the underground equipment."

On Friday, workers checking the equipment found nothing. They said mice, snakes and other small animals are notoriously troublesome because they can squeeze into BG&E;'s high-voltage switching boxes.

One thing utility workers are sure of, however, is what caused Thursday's outage. A workman reconnecting the neighborhood's power circuit "discovered that there was a snake across the contacts of the switch."

The other outages occurred for a few seconds at 8:30 a.m. April 17, 10:18 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday after 6 a.m.

Thursday's outagebegan at 1:39 p.m., and power was restored to the last customer at 2:13 p.m.