T-storms knock out power to many Outage reports highest Down East

Nasty weather that rolled through Maine in the early morning hours Friday left about 10,000 Bangor Hydro-Electric Co. customers without power, the utility said. Lightning also was blamed for a fire that destroyed a Searsmont home on the St. George River.

Another wave of storms rumbled through eastern Maine later in the day Friday.

The earlier storms caused some cable television systems to go down. A cable representative said technicians were working to restore service.

“Basically, as the storm rolled through, we had a lot of small lightning strikes,” Bangor-Hydro spokeswoman Louanne Williams said. “The biggest problem in terms of numbers was in Washington County” where nearly half of the company’s reported outages occurred. Williams said lightning struck Transmission Line 66 – the primary feed for the county – and knocked out electricity for numerous customers Down East.

The storm, with high winds, heavy rain and frequent lightning, started after midnight and brought as much as 2 inches of accumulation in parts of the state, according to Tony Sturey, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Caribou.

“We had a large batch of showers and thunderstorms moving in from the St. Lawrence Valley [in N.Y.],” Sturey said.

The Searsmont home off Route 173 that burned is believed to be owned by the Hughes family, who were away in Newfoundland at the time of the fire. No one was staying in the small two-story structure.

Firefighters from Searsmont, Liberty, Montville, Lincolnville and Morrill responded to the house at about 2:45 p.m. Friday when a passing truck driver reported smelling smoke.

Firefighters think lightning that struck nearly 12 hours earlier caused the fire. Fire Chief Jethro Pease of the Morrill Fire Department pointed to a large fir tree about 20 feet behind the house as the probable culprit. The bark was split in two places, and he explained that lightning often “ricochets” from a tree to a structure.

A smashed electrical insulator on the ground, near where electric service entered the house, and the heavy charring on the clapboard there, Pease said, provided further evidence that the lightning jumped from the tree to the wires and corner of the house.

A large liquid propane tank also was located outside that corner of the house.

No flooding was reported from the storm. Maine State Police in Orono, Bangor police and the Washington and Penobscot County sheriffs’ offices all responded to numerous alarms.

“That’s quite common with this type of storm,” a state trooper said Friday.

Power was restored to all but about 200 customers by early afternoon Friday, Bangor-Hydro reported, after Transmission Line 66 was repaired.

A few outages also were reported in Penobscot County and several more in Hancock County; a few reports of hail came in from Bangor police.

“This weather pattern has resulted from a seasonably strong low-pressure system cycling from southeastward,” Sturey said.

Gail Rice, spokesperson for Central Maine Power, said about 2,000 of its customers went without power for parts of Friday, most in the southern parts of the state where a substation that supplied power to most of York County went down.

CMP also serves parts of Waldo County, and Rice said outages were reported in Rockland, Winterport, Searsport, Belfast and Frankfort.

The early morning storm was also blamed for problems with the Waldo County Communication Center’s tower in Knox. A lightning strike probably knocked the tower out of service. Communication center director Owen Smith was on the scene Friday afternoon, working to bring the tower back on line.

In Machias, the University of Maine at Machias was largely without power through 11 a.m. The phone system in administrative offices in Powers Hall was being powered by a generator, while the rest of the campus was dark.

The Washington County jail, courthouse and district attorney’s office, and the Machias post office had power restored by 9 a.m. because of the services they handle. But in East Machias, the next town, the Maine State Police Troop J building was working off a generator.

At the White House Restaurant on U.S. Route 1 in Jonesboro. customers ate by candlelight, comforted by coffee and food cooked on the gas stove, while dirty dishes were stacking up through the morning’s early hours awaiting restored electrical power for the dishwasher.

NEWS reporters Katherine Cassidy and Tom Groening contributed to this story.