FORT KENT – CLOSED FOR BUSINESS.

That may have been the best way to describe Aroostook County, especially its northern reaches, after the area was dumped on with rain and heavy snow Tuesday and Wednesday.

As much as 36 inches of snow fell in some parts of the St. John Valley, according to workers plowing the roads. Winds blew up to 35 miles per hour creating drifts up to 10 feet deep in some areas.

And this was on top of a foot of new snow that fell Sunday.

Most schools, including night adult education classes in Aroostook County were closed Wednesday, along with all state offices and classes at both the University of Maine at Fort Kent and Presque Isle and Northern Maine Community College. Most meetings were canceled during the day and evening.

Many businesses, including banks, credit unions and service agencies, were closed as well. Radio stations spent much of their time informing people about what was closed. Someone said it would have been easier to announce what was open.

The National Weather Service said snow was relatively light south of the St. John Valley, where it said 25 inches fell in the Fort Kent-Madawaska areas overnight. In Caribou snow depths were 13 inches, Presque Isle 12 inches and only 2 inches in Houlton. Caribou has now received 113 inches of snow this season, 21 inches more than usual for the date, according to the NWS.

Tony Mignon, a meteorologist with the NWS at Caribou, said the storm was created by an intense low-pressure system over the Great Lakes that moved east and redeveloped off the coast of Maine.

“It was a very intense low pressure system,” he said. “It is now moving off to the north and east.

“There are still intense winds lingering around,” he said. “Those should come down during the evening and night hours.”

Warmer temperatures in central and southern Aroostook County kept snow depths much lower.

A dispatcher for the Presque Isle Police Department said Wednesday that city roads were snow-covered and windswept but that police had not seen much road activity all day. In fact, police had dealt with very few incidents on the roads, which was unexpected, the dispatcher said, considering the past two days of stormy weather.

The Maine State Police reported a similar lack of road activity across the region. Icy conditions and blowing snow kept many people off the roads. They responded to only a few cars off the roadways.

In Presque Isle, road crews had been busy since early Tuesday morning trying to keep roads clear, according to Public Works Director Gerry James. Some had been working on snow cleanup efforts for more than 40 hours straight, he said Wednesday.

Tuesday’s rain sent slush into Main Street catch basins, plugging up the drainage system and causing flooding on the city’s thoroughfare, James said. In some spots, the water was more than a foot deep.

Crews worked through Tuesday afternoon, poking holes into the slush with crowbars to drain the water, but had to switch over to snow removal when cooler weather moved in, creating sleet, wet, heavy snow and lots of ice on the roads, James said.

“In my 19 years of work here, last night [Tuesday] is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” the public works director said.

On Wednesday, crews dealt with wind, drifting snow and a slippery layer of ice on the roadways.

“We’ve been sanding and sanding and we’re starting to get ahead of it now,” James said.

Crews working the roads in the St. John Valley said it was worse than what the weather service was reporting.

“We’ve had up to 36 inches of snow, and winds creating drifts that closed some roads,” Yves Lizotte, public works superintendent at Madawaska, said at noon Wednesday. “We’ve had crews plowing roads since it started snowing Monday afternoon.

“We had to use a snowblower [mounted on a front-end loader] to clear back roads because plows, even a V-plow mounted on a 10-wheel truck, could not make it through,” he said. “We’ve had to go through 7-foot and higher drifts on some roads.”

Lizotte kept a skeleton crew to sweep roads Wednesday afternoon, and the entire crew was to return to work just before midnight. During the last two days, he said, he had his 10-man full-time crew, six part-time men, five or six sidewalk cleaners, and nine contractors with snow-rack trucks on duty just about around the clock.

“This is as bad as I can remember,” he said. “Even worse than the one we had two years ago.

“It took 41/2 hours to clean Main Street during the night, the longest time ever,” he said. “During that time we must have hauled 125 truckloads of snow away.”

He said the windrows created by plows on Main Street in Madawaska were higher than the front of the huge snowblower.

Gendreau and Lavertu Roads and Talbot Drive were closed for a time until they brought the huge snowblower to open the roads.

“We will get through it,” Lizotte said before going home for a few hours sleep. “We will get the best of it, we always do.”

In the small town of St. Agatha, Public Works Foreman Ricky Chamberland said it was too much for him and Roger Chasse to keep their 30 miles of roads open. They hired Jason Daigle to help and were running two 10-wheeler plow trucks and a payloader going round the clock.

At 1 p.m. Wednesday, he said he and his two men had been going steady since 3 a.m. Tuesday.

“We have not stopped since,” he said, the fatigued noticeable in his voice. “We will be going all day and night again.

“Hopefully this snow and wind will die tonight,” he said. “If not, we will.”

They lost Brook Road Wednesday morning when one of the trucks stopped for three hours because of a mechanical problem. They hired Labrie Farms with a 9-foot-wide tractor-mounted snowblower to open a 2-mile section of road that had drifts up to 10 feet deep.

The road that had been blocked from about 5 a.m. Wednesday was open at about 2 p.m.

Chamberland said he measured 34 inches of snow that had fallen since Tuesday morning.

“It gets blinding as we drive through the night because everything is the same color,” Chamberland said. “We get dizzy operating with the lights.

“I haven’t seen it this bad in at least 12 years,” he said. “It didn’t help when we had the mechanical problems.”

Snow started falling in the St. John Valley Monday afternoon, continued through the night and was falling all day Tuesday, with accumulations of between four and 12 inches of new snow. Another 2 feet fell through the night Tuesday into Wednesday.

Meteorologists had measured 34 inches of snow on the ground at Fort Kent Monday afternoon, before the latest storm moved into the area.

Fort Kent had rather serious equipment problems with two snowblowers down. Police Chief Kenneth Michaud was using his personal four-wheel drive pickup because his cruiser was mired in snow.

“We’ve had breakdowns, but we are back in operation now,” Fort Kent Town Manager Donald Guimond, the only person at the town office, said about 2 p.m. Wednesday. “We are sending snow crews home at 3 or 4 [p.m.] for some sleep.

“They’ve been out since Tuesday afternoon and had not had much sleep on Sunday and Monday,” he said. “We will come back on later tonight [Wednesday].”

He said no roads were blocked, but some were only accessible to four-wheel drive vehicles because they were snow-covered.

BDN reporter Rachel Rice contributed to this story.