Tens of thousands of residents lost electricity Thursday afternoon. Data from Power Outage indicated that disruptions extended into South Dakota. Rocky Mountain Power reported that roughly 55,000 customers in central and northeast Wyoming were affected. In a 2:30 p.m. update, the utility said the cause of the outage remained under investigation and crews were working to restore service “as safely and quickly as possible.”

Wyoming PBS reported that Black Hills Energy, which serves parts of northeastern Wyoming and South Dakota, said at about 1:40 p.m. that the outages were linked to a transmission facility outside its system. The company began re-energizing its grid around 2:30 p.m., restoring power to roughly half of its affected customers by midafternoon. Restoration efforts were expecte

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