An aggressive dog prompted the U.S. Postal Service to stop delivering mail to an entire Powell block for roughly seven weeks, but the agency was recently able to restore service.

Service was paused in the 200 block of North Bernard Street after a carrier was bitten on Aug. 18. The carrier reported that the dog got out and nipped at him, biting through his pants and breaking the skin, said Powell Police Chief Roy Eckerdt. The owner received warnings for dog running at large, failure to obtain a city dog license and dangerous or vicious animal, Eckerdt said.

It apparently wasn’t the carrier’s first encounter with the canine, either: Eckerdt said the dog had reportedly been loose the previous day, and the Postal Service planned to stop delivering mail to the address until it was better contained. After the bite, however, the Postal Service stopped serving the entire block, which includes 10 addresses.

One of those residents, Bryant Startin, said he never received notice about the stoppage, only learning about the situation when a merchant informed him that his package couldn’t be delivered. When he asked Powell postal workers what was going on, Startin said he was told that residents on the block would need to pick up their mail at the post office until further notice; in the future, he was told, the USPS might add a community mailbox at the south end of the block.

Startin said in mid-September that he found the situation “crazy”; being punished over another resident’s dog “just doesn’t seem right,” he said.

However, if an aggressive dog is on the loose, the Postal Service can and will stop service to the area, “because we do take the safety of our employees extremely seriously,” USPS Senior Director of Occupational Safety and Health Linda DeCarlo said in a June podcast from the agency.

“If your dog has bitten somebody, we’re gonna not deliver mail to your house until that dog is under control and we know for a fact that you’ve got them restrained and not in a path of causing that kind of harm again,” DeCarlo said.

She further warned that, if your dog is loose “you could actually impact the delivery of mail to your neighbors, because we’re not going to let our people go into a situation that we know has the potential [of] resulting in a dog bite.”

Dogs are notorious for disliking mail carriers, and USPS figures indicate it’s a significant safety concern: In 2022, more than 5,300 postal employees were attacked by dogs across the country.

DeCarlo encouraged dog owners to restrain their pets, adding that, “nobody wants to be that person that makes all of your neighbors have to get in the car every day to drive down to a local post office to pick up their mail.”

While that was the situation for residents in the 200 block of North Bernard Street, the situation has since been resolved: On Oct. 11, Startin received a notice that mail service was resuming. Exactly what prompted the change is unclear — a Denver-based spokesman for the USPS didn’t answer repeated inquiries from the Tribune about the situation — but Startin said this week that service is now back to normal.