Electricity restored to most Mainers who lost power in potent windstorm

Nearly all of the 30,000 Mainers who lost power as a result of Thursday’s high-intensity windstorm had their electricity restored by Friday afternoon.

Bangor Hydro-Electric Co., which serves most of eastern and northern Maine, reported only a few hundred outages Friday afternoon, mostly in northern Penobscot County and Piscataquis County. At the peak Thursday afternoon, nearly 10,000 Bangor Hydro customers were in the dark.

The storm, which brought wind gusts as high as 70 miles per hour and heavy rain at times, hit the western mountain region of Maine the hardest.

Most people in Aroostook County had their power restored by 3 a.m. Friday after nearly 24 hours of work by crews of Maine Public Service Co.

Single services were still out here and there through the County, but major outages had all been taken care of by around-the-clock crews, according to Virginia Joles, spokeswoman for Maine Public Service Co. As many as 4,000 customers lost power at one time or another during the storm.

Sustained winds of 20 to 30 mph, with gusts to 50 mph, struck throughout Aroostook County from Thursday afternoon to late Thursday night.

Police reported problems throughout the County, with northern areas – including Fort Kent, Eagle Lake and Allagash – hit the worst by downed trees and power lines. Crews also had a hard time in Presque Isle, Caribou and south to Island Falls.

Central Maine Power Co., which has service centers in southern Maine and in Rockland and Skowhegan, topped out at more than 20,000 customers without power late Thursday.

By mid-Friday, less than 2,500 CMP customers remained without service, but 1,100 were in the Skowhegan area.

“Our crews were able to make great progress overnight restoring power to customers; we have now restored power to more than 90 percent of the customers whose service was disrupted,” CMP spokesman John Carroll said in a statement released Friday.

In eastern Maine, the storm lasted only a few hours, but it wreaked havoc with tree limbs, knocking some onto power lines while others fell and blocked roadways. Some trees caught fire briefly after connecting with power lines.

Fort Kent Police Chief Kenneth Michaud said his dispatchers took at least 50 calls Thursday afternoon and evening. He and his officers carried chainsaws in the trunks of their cruisers to cut trees out of the way.

“Our people worked through the night,” Joles of the Maine Public Service Co. said Friday morning. “We had our challenges and our crews met them.

“The Fort Kent-Allagash area, northern Aroostook County, were the hardest hit with trees and wires down,” she said. “There were widespread outages, but things are in pretty good shape right now.”

Michaud said trees were down on electrical and telephone lines, at least one electrical transformer, across railroad tracks and on cars.

Madawaska Police Chief Ronald Pelletier said that town also had reports of trees down, but the only electrical outages were on both sides of the town, at Frenchville and St. David Village.

Van Buren lost power for a time, Police Chief Michael Bressett said. Electrical lines came down and started minor grass and tree fires in Caribou.

The longest outage, according to Joles, was to 50 customers on the Route 161 corridor west of Fort Kent to Allagash. Some of them were out for up to five hours from noon to 5 p.m. Thursday.

Some customers in Fort Kent waited until about 10 a.m. Friday before power was restored, Joles said.

At the University of Maine at Fort Kent, evening classes were canceled after a tree took out the major electrical service line onto the campus. Full power was restored by 11 a.m. Friday.

No one appeared to be seriously injured as a result of the storm, but police agencies across the state dealt with minor accidents that were related to high winds and hydroplaning.

The weather rebounded nicely Friday as most of the state saw temperatures in the high 50s and low 60s, according to a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Caribou.