Power restored west of Havre

Power has been restored to customers after an outage west of Havre.

NorthWestern Energy spokesperson Butch Larcombe said this morning that the outage was reported at 7:40 a.m, and affected 465 NorthWestern Energy customers in Rudyard, Gildford, Hingham, Kremlin, Joplin and Inverness. Power was restored at about 9 a.m.

A line from a transmission system was found on the ground about 5 miles west of Havre, Larcomb said, but crews can’t say for sure why it was on the ground,

He added that reports of a downed line from that same system about 3 miles further west are still being investigated.

A representative of Hill County Electric also said power had been out west of Havre but had been restored to the cooperative’s customers as well. Requests for information as to the cause of the outages and when they occurred were not returned before print deadline today.