Idaho Falls power outage blamed on mylar balloons

Approximately 5,800 Idaho Falls Power customers were without electricity Friday after a line failure at 9:52 a.m. The outage affected the downtown and north-west sections of the city.

Idaho Falls Power Customer Service spokesman Van Ashton said the probable cause of the outage were mylar balloons that were found in some of the power lines.

Repair crews were systematically trouble-shooting power lines between each of three substations before all were brought back on line.

The Templeview substation was restored at 12:30 p.m., the North Boulevard substation at 12:50 p.m., and the downtown substation at 1:20 p.m.

Each substation serves about two thousand customers.

Because of the outage, students at Bush Elementary school were released at 12:30 p.m.