Severe thunderstorms – and possibly a tornado – ripped through northern Penobscot County on Saturday night, uprooting trees, blocking roads and leaving hundreds without electricity.

“It was like somebody grabbed it with their hands and pulled it out of the ground,” Kingman Fire Chief John Moody said of a large spruce tree, the base of which measured at least 20 inches in diameter, which was plucked from a neighbor’s yard by high winds.

Researchers from the National Weather Service in Caribou headed to the area Sunday morning to assess the damage caused by the fast-moving thunderstorms with winds reaching 70 miles per hour.

On Sunday morning, road crews and utility crews continued to clean up after the early-evening storms, which traveled east through northern Somerset and Piscataquis counties before hitting the remote area north of Lincoln and continuing on through northern Washington County and New Brunswick.

The most severe weather was in the area northeast of Lincoln, where a tornado warning was in effect from 7:30 to 8 p.m. Saturday.

“They were very organized and very strong thunderstorms,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Chris Norcross, although he added that there had been no confirmed sightings of a tornado touching down in the area.

There were no serious injuries as a result of the storm, but there were reports of a man suffering a broken leg in Webster at the time. Falling trees caused minor damage to a few homes, according to officials.

About 800 customers of the Eastern Maine Electric Cooperative lost power in the storm, which downed trees and power lines for miles, particularly in the areas of Tucker Ridge and Bottle Lake. An Eastern Maine Electric Cooperative spokesman said Sunday morning that power had been restored to most customers, and crews expected to fix the remainder of the outages that day.

Fire Chief Moody said his crews and those from the neighboring Lee Fire Department worked until early Sunday morning clearing trees from the blocked Routes 170 and 171, along with other areas of town.

Moody and his wife even felt the storm’s effects at their home as it lifted the top off his Jeep and deposited it in a neighbor’s yard, where the couple also retrieved several lawn chairs.

“It was a mess,” Moody said.

BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTOS BY DENISE FARWELL

A worker for the Eastern Maine Electric Cooperative pulls to free a utility wire from tree limbs along Route 170 in Prentiss Township after a possible tornado Saturday evening caused hundreds of power outages and damage in northern Penobscot County.

“We drove down from Mattawamkeag and you couldn’t see going 15 miles an hour,” said Charity Cole (left) of her evening drive to Webster Plantation on Saturday. Cole pulls limbs out of the road as her father, Hazen Jipson, road commissioner for Webster Plantation, moves debris on the Pickle Ridge Road on Sunday after tornadolike weather hit the area Saturday night.