Power restored to Salmon area

Idaho Power Company reports electricity service has been restored to thousands of customers affected by an outage in the Salmon and Leadore areas Thursday night.

Company spokesperson Brad Bowlin said the problem was caused by a disruption to power lines between Dillon, Montana and Salmon.Because of adverse weather and difficult terrain, a helicopter was used to try to trace the problem.

In fact, he said those helicopter runs along the power line did not find any specific problems. Crews then began slowly reopening breakers to the affected area.

He noted that sometimes a tree will fall across a power line and create an outage.And if the tree falls away from the line, it can reverse the problem.

Power was restored to customers early Friday afternoon.

Because of the outage, South Lemhi School District No. 292 did not hold classes Friday.