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Extra Crews Brought in to Restore Power to Thousands of Mainers Left in the Dark

Keith Shortall
/
MPBN

Utility crews say it may take several days for some customers to get their electricity back, after the powerful early-season snowstorm that hit parts of the state on Sunday.

Central Maine Power and Emera Maine have brought in extra crews from neighboring New England states and the Canadian Maritimes to help with restoration efforts, which could take several days. The storm dumped more than a foot of snow in some Midcoast communities.

The snow - heavy and wet - was a pain to deal with, for sure. But it was those 50-mile-per-hour winds, battering some communities Downeast and along the Midcoast, that turned a late autumn nuisance into a big-time mess.

"This storm, with the high winds and heavy snow, did considerable damage to our service area, particularly in Knox, Waldo and Lincoln Counties," says Gail Rice of Central Maine Power Company. Residents throughout these Midcoast counties awoke Monday to a disjointed landscape of disrupted power lines - some severed, others on their way - and downed tree limbs, blocking roads and driveways and littering front and backyards.

As of 4:30 Monday afternoon, more than 70,000 CMP customers remained without power. "We're working on assessing the damage," Rice says, "to both the transmission and our major distribution feeds."

That work, says Gail Rice, has been going on most of the day. Late this afternoon, with a better sense of the scale of the damage, CMP began shifting most of its focus to restoration efforts. "Some people in some of the more densely-populated areas will get their service back sooner. People in more remote areas - it could be a couple more days," she says.

Rice says all of the company's line workers are working on the restoration effort. They're getting some help from crews from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and the Maritimes.

Maine's other large utility has also had to call in reinforcements from Atlantic Canada. "And they're coming from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Some are coming from in state," says Susan Faloon of Emera Maine. As of the middle of this afternoon, Faloon says the utility had around 43,000 people without power.

"We do expect to have Washington County pretty much cleaned up by the end of the day," she says. "It's looking like we'll have the northern part of Penobscot County mostly taken care of by Wednesday, maybe a little bit earlier in the day than the other two areas that we're working on, and that is Penobscot County, more to the southern part of it, and Hancock County. Those are the two areas hardest hit and that's where we're really seeing a lot of damage."

Faloon says Emera has had a helicopter patrolling its transmission lines all day to more quickly locate key damage points. Both Emera and CMP are urging customers to be patient as the restoration work continues.