The lights are back on in Portage la Prairie.

Manitoba Hydro says power has been fully restored to the approximately 3,100 customers affected by an outage in the city that began at 6:18 p.m. Monday evening. Manitoba Hydro Manager of Public Affairs Scott Powell says service was restored to most of those affected by 7:15 p.m. and the lights flickered back on for the remaining customers by 7:40 p.m.

The outage was caused by a malfunctioning 66,000 volt line feeding the Portage South Substation.

"We're not sure of the exact cause, what caused the 66,000 volt line to trip out (and) go offline," Powell explains. "What we did to restore the outage was switch that substation over to an alternate source of supply, which brought electricity back to our customers."

Crews are still working to determine the cause of the initial interruption and will repair the line, then switch back to regular supply. Powell doesn't anticipate any additional interruptions in hydro service.

"Our crews responded quite quickly to this and we were happy to get a vast majority of customers up in about an hour," Powell notes. "We're continuing to patrol the line that was the cause of the initial outage in order to determine the cause and execute repairs once we find what the issue was."