23,000 Avista customers lose power in Spokane Tuesday morning

Avista Utilities said equipment problems led to about 23,000 customers losing power just before 9 a.m. Tuesday on the South Hill and in the East Central neighborhood in Spokane.

The outages were caused by a transformer blowing out at a substation, said Debbie Simock, a utility spokeswoman. Most customers had their power restored in 14 minutes, she said.

Electricity was restored to all but 7,000 of those customers by 9:30 a.m. Only about 1,300 customers were without power by 9:45 a.m.

Because of redundancies in its power system, Avista was about to reroute the electricity through other equipment, she said.

This story will be updated.