An equipment failure caused well over a thousand Laramie customers to lose power for just over four hours Tuesday.

Paul Murphy of Rocky Mountain Power says that at 1,297 customers lost power at 7:56 p.m. due to a line that went down and a burnt jumper.

Murphy says another 319 customers had to lose power at 10:13 p.m. in order for crews to make repairs, but all 1,616 customers had their power back by 12:15 a.m. Wednesday.

Murphy says the cause could be any number of things. Typically, weather will cause debris to hit the power line – resulting in the line arcing and equipment briefly catching fire. Murphy says there must have been a small fire that burnt equipment and caused the outage.

“It could be weather, it could be wind, it could be snow, it could be rain, it could be a squirrel, it could be a bird,” says Murphy.

“But our goal is not so much as what caused the problem,” says Murphy, “but to fix the problem as quickly as possible.”

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