4,900 Hi-Line residents lose power Sunday in brief outage

Almost 5,000 NorthWestern Energy customers lost power in an outage Sunday morning that affected mostly Havre, Lohman and the surrounding areas, but was fixed within three hours.

A message from Hill County Electric Sunday said power was out in Harlem and Malta, but the cooperative this morning reported it had no outages and NorthWestern Energy did not report outages past Havre.

Power went out just before 7:30 and affected thousands of homes and businesses in the area, as well as shutting off street lights and traffic signals.

NorthWestern Energy spokesperson Brandy Powers said the outage was due to equipment failure at a local substation, but a crew arrived quickly to make repairs, with most affected customers seeing their power restored within an hour.

By 10:30 a.m., she said, all customers had power back.