Boise (670 KBOI News) – Idaho Power is working to restore service to thousands of homes and businesses, after a huge outage that darkened homes in the most heavily populated part of town.

Spokesman Brad Bowlin says about 11:30, power went out in West Boise…like pretty much ALL of West Boise.

“We had a very significant outage over in West Boise, affecting customers essentially between Ustick and Fairview, and west of Cole, out toward Five Mile,” said Bowlin.  “There was an issue with our substation on Ustick.”

He says technicians were able to get the power rerouted to another substation, and get service restored to most of the area within about 30 minutes.

He says they’re still trying to figure out what happened to the Ustick substation, and get it fixed.

But he says it’s a good thing such a wide-spread outage happened on a fairly mild day in the middle of winter.  Had it happened in the middle of summer, with all the homes and businesses running their lights and air conditioners, power usage would be too great to route it through an alternate substation.