Tuesday’s storm left Maine with an additional 20 inches of snow in some areas and widespread power outages in others.
At Central Maine Power, spokeswoman Gail Rice says the combination of heavy, wet snow and powerful winds took its toll on the company’s power lines. She says outages peaked Tuesday night when 32,000 CMP customers reported power losses.
“The peak was nearly 32,000 at 10:30 last night and we’re down to a little over 17,000 at about 3 p.m. today,” she says. “So we’re nearly halfway there and we have a lot of crews out in the field doing a lot of work so we expect that number to continue to drop.”
Rice says the outages were due primarily to a combination of storm events.
“We had the heavy wet snow and we also had very high winds that hit the area yesterday during the height of that storm, so the combination of those two things are what caused some problems for us and mainly these problems consisted of trees coming down on lines and also some lines coming down to the ground,” she says.
Rice says she expects that most affected CMP customers should have power restored by late tonight.
In northern and eastern Maine, electrical service is provided by Emera, and the company reported that fewer than 1,120 customers remained without power this afternoon, down from nearly 7,500 earlier in the morning.