Nearly 35,000 lose power in Tucson area for several hours

TUCSON — Power was restored Thursday afternoon to all 35,000 Tucson Electric Power customers who lost electricity after an equipment failure, officials said.

Crews finished restoring power to the University Medical Center by mid-afternoon. Virtually all other service had resumed before 1 p.m., said Joe Salkowski, a spokesman for the utility.

The outage began with equipment difficulties at a substation that in turn impacted a major transformer and affected customers across a wide swath of the city and other parts of Pima County,

A contractor doing excavation work on a project to expand the substation accidentally cut through some control cabling, knocking the transformer out of service, Salkowski said.

Salkowski said subsequent short outages occurred, briefly affecting as many as 9,000 customers because their circuits were overloaded as power to those initially cut off was being rerouted through them.

Scattered outages began about 10:30 a.m., affecting homes, businesses and even traffic signals within about a 150-square mile area ranging from several miles north of the city to south of downtown Tucson.

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