A power outage occurred this morning in Potlatch and the surrounding area, affecting thousands of customers of Clearwater Power and Avista Utilities. Avista indicated that the outage began around 7:00 AM on Thursday. The utility estimates that power restoration will occur around noon today. Clearwater reported that the outage was due to a failure in an Avista transmission line, impacting approximately 3,000 customers. The cause of the outage is currently under investigation by Avista.