Estimated read time: Less than a minute
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SALT LAKE CITY — Power is back on after a blackout that at its peak affected more than 82,000 Rocky Mountain Power customers in Salt Lake, Tooele, and Davis counties.
The outage hit around 10:45 p.m. Thursday. At one point, lights from the Capitol building were the only ones visible in downtown Salt Lake City.
The outage lasted nearly six hours and hit Bountiful, Centerville, North Salt Lake, South Salt Lake, Salt Lake City, Magna, and West Valley City.
For the latest updates and info please check https://t.co/5KJ7zcJbrr
— Rocky Mountain Power (@RMP_Utah) May 20, 2016
Some businesses downtown were forced to close early due to the outage.
Rocky Mountain power says the cause was a transmission interruption.
During the outage, KSL received several calls from residents concerned about large flames coming from the Tesoro Refinery in North Salt Lake.
The refinery said the outage did impact its operations and that the refinery went into shut-down mode.
Tesoro said the large flares are actually extra gas being burned off so the refinery doesn't over pressurize during the shut down.
