Diana Stapleton, owner of Rainbow Planet Coffee House, had to figure out Jessica Pacheco's change by hand as the midday power outage darkened North Fourth Avenue.

JAMES S. WOOD / arizona daily star

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As many as 35,000 customers were without power for about two hours Wednesday after a cable was accidentally cut by a contractor during an excavation at a Tucson Electric Power substation.

The widespread outage began at 10:29 a.m. and power was restored to most customers about 12:40 p.m., said TEP spokesman Joe Salkowski.

TEP had to divert the power to other circuits around the transformer, Salkowski said.

Affected customers were scattered across much of central and western Tucson, including the University of Arizona.

The outage extended as far north as Tangerine Road, south to 22nd Street, east to Alvernon Way and west to Camino de la Tierra, Salkowski said.

University Medical Center was unaffected by the outage, but other nearby buildings including the UA's College of Medicine operated for some time on emergency backup power, said Katie Riley, a spokeswoman for the UA Health Sciences Center.

The UA campus remained open, but university laboratories were instructed to shut down all chemical process and fume hoods during the outage.

Salkowski said it was a significant outage, but said weather-related outages last summer affected more customers for longer periods of time.

The outage occurred after a contractor working at a TEP substation north of Downtown accidentally cut through a control cable, Salkowski said. As a result, a transformer was knocked out of service.

Because of the power outage, two vehicles collided at East Grant Road and North Mountain Avenue, north of the UA, and one of them rolled, said Sgt. Fabian Pacheco, a Tucson Police Department spokesman. The collision resulted in minor injuries, he said.

Tucson police had no other major incidents.