Power restored after outage hits nearly 5,000 Columbia customers

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

UPDATE: The Water and Light map showed no outages at about 9:15 a.m. A utility spokesman said three feeders went down at the power plant.

ORIGINAL: Power outages stopped electric service to nearly 5,000 Columbia Water and Light customers Tuesday morning.

The six outages affected 4,908 customers as of 9 a.m. The outages happened a little before 9 a.m. and were centered at the city's power plant off Business Loop 70, according to the Water and Light outage map.

Emergency dispatchers sent out an alert saying the outage was affecting traffic lights in central Columbia. First responder radio traffic indicated dispatchers were getting a flood of calls about the outages. It wasn't immediately clear what caused the outages.

Some schools are also being affected, but students are safe, Columbia Public Schools said in a message to families.