Thousands of homes still without power

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With a major winter storm poised to hit the region today, utility crews raced Tuesday to repair the damage done by the weekend’s high winds and heavy rain.

By noon Tuesday, close to 14,000 power customers remained without power throughout Maine in areas served by the state’s three major power providers: Bangor Hydro-Electric Co., Central Maine Power Co. and Maine Public Service.

Motels in the Ellsworth area, working with the local chapter of the American Red Cross, provided shelter Monday night for 27 people and two dogs from seven families who were stranded without electrical power in the wake of the weekend storm.

“We started receiving calls from people with no power and we started calling the local motels asking what might be available,” said Susan Devaney, director of development and community relations at the Red Cross chapter in Ellsworth. “If they couldn’t donate rooms, we would have paid, but we live in a wonderful community and always receive wonderful support from the business community. Their response was overwhelming.”

Most of the families were from Mount Desert Island and Surry.

Some organization, such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars, opened their halls as a shelter, and some area fire departments revved up their generators and opened their fire stations during part of Monday night to provide a warm space for those without power.

Most families had left the motels Tuesday.

Although the power companies had supplemented crews in the affected areas Tuesday and expected to work through the night with rotating crews, officials were unsure whether power could be restored by the time the latest storm was expected to hit late Tuesday.

Crews from the Massachusetts Electric reinforced Bangor Hydro crews in an effort to restore power to more than 10,000 customers who were without electricity as of early Tuesday. By noon, that number had dropped to 7,280.

In CMP’s service area, the Brunswick area continued to have a high number of outages, with 450 without power at 5 p.m. Farmington, with 750 affected customers, and Skowhegan with 685, also had serious problems.

CMP crews from the Bangor and Lincoln service centers were sent to reinforce crews in Hancock and Washington counties, where most of the power outages had occurred. Coastal areas were the hardest hit, according to Jennifer Brooker, a supervisor at CMP’s customer service center, with the heaviest outages along the western islands in Hancock County, including, Deer Isle, Blue Hill and Southwest Harbor.

Maine Public Service crews were concentrating on urban areas in order to restore power to the majority of the 2,000 customers still without power as quickly as possible.

In Aroostook County, 300 to 500 MPS customers were without electricity as of 3:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Virginia Joles, communications director for the Presque Isle utility, said progress in restoring power was slow in heavily wooded areas, as crews worked to remove numerous trees from power lines, before they reset poles and wires.

Officials with Eastern Maine Electric Cooperative in Calais reported late Tuesday afternoon that crews were working to restore power to about 20 homes, mostly in the Shin Pond area in northern Penobscot County.

Power in that area was expected to be fully restored by Tuesday night, although utility crews were expected to take a few more days to repair other storm damage.

The Houlton Water Co., which serves customers in the Houlton area, reported that power had been restored to all customers Tuesday.

Joles, of MPS, said there were concerns about deteriorating weather and the effect on repair efforts.

“With predictions of 6 to 8 inches of snow in the forecast, restoration in the troubled areas could be set back because of snow-loaded trees on an already stressed system,” Joles said in a news release.

As long as conditions did not get too bad, MPS crews were expected to be able to restore power to most customers in southern and central Aroostook County urban areas by early evening Tuesday.

Crews were then expected to move north into the lakes regions, including Madawaska Lake, Rainbow Cove, Long Lake, Van Buren Cove and Cross Lake, where some customers could be without power for another day, according to Joles.

Central Maine Power Co. spokesman Mark Ishkanian said crews hoped to have all power restored by Tuesday night, but also said the progress was slow throughout the company’s coverage area.

“We have more than 150 utility and tree crews and additional support personnel working on this restoration effort,” Ishkanian said. “The isolated nature of the remaining outages is making for slow going, especially in the Brunswick area, but our goal is to have service restored to most, if not all customers this evening.”

The latest storm could hamper any repair efforts not completed by nightfall.

The National Weather Service was forecasting that the storm would move into Maine on Tuesday night, bringing with it snow, sleet and freezing rain.

Mark Bloomer, a weather service meteorologist, said the storm was expected to drop 4 to 8 inches of snow in the Bangor area before changing to sleet and freezing rain, and possibly all rain during the morning hours Wednesday.

“This storm came into Chicago and the upper Midwest and then dropped down into the Southeast,”‘ Bloomer said Tuesday afternoon. “It’s going to race up the coast tonight.

“It will be windy for a time; not like the last time,” he said. “But it could get gusty for a while. It’s going to be a mess.”

Bloomer said another snowstorm is expected this weekend.