Three electric power stations in Washington are vandalized -- cutting power to about 14K people

"Vandalism" at three power stations in western Washington this Sunday cut power to about 14,000 residents, the Associated Press reports.

The outage comes after a large outage in North Carolina earlier this month that took days to repair that was due to suspected vandalism.

"Tacoma Public Utilities reported vandalism at about 5:30 a.m. Sunday at one substation, followed by vandalism at a second substation, the sheriff’s office said. The outages affected about 7,300 customers in an area southeast of Tacoma. Just before noon, the utility had restored power to all but 2,700 customers whose power was estimated to be restored at about 6:30 p.m. Sunday," the AP's report stated. "Meanwhile, just before noon, Puget Sound Energy reported vandalism that had happened at about 2:30 a.m. Sunday caused a power outage at one of its substations. The nearly 7,700 customers who lost power had it restored by 5 a.m., Puget Sound spokesperson Andrew Padula said. The company is investigating, along with authorities, and declined to comment further, Padula said."

Police say someone forced their way into a restricted area around the substations and damaged equipment, causing the power outage. There are no suspects in custody and it's not known if it was a coordinated attack.

As CNN points out, anti-government groups have used online forums to urge followers to attack critical infrastructure, including power grids.