The lights went out in Archuleta County for nearly 6,000 La Plata Electric Association customers Saturday morning when transmission lines that feed the county failed.

Nearly half the county’s population – 5,777 – were without power as of 9:41 a.m.

The Tri State Generation and Transmission Association line affected LPEA’s Pagosa and Ponderosa substations, according to a report by Mike Alley, LPEA’s Pagosa Springs district manager. Crews began sectionalizing the system to pinpoint possible locations of the failure and were able to restore power to the Pagosa substation about 10:15 a.m., getting about 3,400 customers up and running in the process.

Within 30 minutes, power was restored to the remaining customers served by the Ponderosa substation.

Alley said no visible damage was found, and crews had yet to isolate a cause of the outage.