SPOKANE, Wash. — Power slowly came back to thousands of people who lost it as strong winds blew through Spokane and North Idaho on Monday evening.
At the height of the outages, at least 5,000 Avista, Kootenai Electric and Inland Power customers were without power. Only several Avista customers are still without power on Tuesday morning.
At about 11:30 p.m., Avista reported outages in Colville, Coeur d'Alene, Spokane Valley, the Palouse, Twin Beaches and Lewiston.
According to the Avista Outage map, at 11:30 p.m. 2,651 customers were without power across the company’s coverage area.
According to Inland Power's outage map at 11:30 p.m., 156 customers in Bonner, Stevens and Garfield counties were still without power. Power has since been restored to most customers.
Inland Power said around 7:10 p.m. a transmission line was down and knocked out the EWAN substation. This caused an outages northwest of Endicott.
Snow and winds 20 to 30 miles per hour with gusts up to 50 miles per hour are being reported around the Inland Northwest. Temperatures are expected to drop into the teens Monday evening.
The Spokane and Coeur d'Alene areas saw bursts of snowfall near I-90.
On Oct. 25, more than 3,000 customers on Spokane’s South Hill lost power for several hours due to high winds.
On Oct. 9, 32,000 Avista customers, mostly on the South Hill and in Airway Heights, lost power during a surprise snowstorm. It took several days for power to be restored to every home.
