Hancock County residents still recovering from rainstorm

By this morning, most of the residents in Hancock County will have their power restored, ending a long and dark couple of days for some.

The weekend wind and rainstorm hit the coastal county the hardest, particularly the communities on Mount Desert Island.

As of late afternoon Tuesday, Bangor Hydro-Electric Co. had reconnected power to many of its customers, but about 900 remained in the dark, especially in rural parts of Hancock County.

“We have a few crews ready in our service areas in northern Maine and the Greater Bangor area, but outside of that, everybody else is in Hancock County,” Bangor Hydro spokeswoman Jen Brooker said Tuesday.

“There might more linesmen there than residents,” she joked.

Many of the utility’s workers have been logging extremely long workdays since Saturday when the storm cut power to nearly 30,000 customers at its peak.

More than 10,000 remained without power Monday as crews dealt with additional winds that caused new outages while the ones from the weekend were still being dealt with.

“We made a lot of progress, but we saw a lot of ups and downs as well,” Brooker said.

Aside from additional outages reported Monday, she explained that when workers repair lines, they often have to cut power on the lines because of safety concerns. Suddenly, those who had power would lose it for a brief period, she said.

“Thankfully, the wind has given us a break today and we can make some progress,” Brooker added.

In the southern part of the state, Central Maine Power had restored power to all but about 200 residents in the Brunswick area. At the storm’s peak, 38,000 CMP customers lost power.

“It’s been a long haul,” CMP spokeswoman Gail Rice said Tuesday. “Our linesmen have been working 17-hour days since Saturday.”

Both Bangor Hydro and CMP have been forced to dip into significant overtime contingencies thanks to the weekend storm.

Brooker said her company routinely budgets for a certain amount of overtime but added that the recent spending would be “significant, but needed.” Bangor Hydro’s parent company, Emera Inc., did send several workers from sister companies in Canada to assist.

Rice said as many as 500 CMP workers have logged hours over the last few days.

“We work until the job is done and then crunch the numbers later,” she said when asked about overtime.

The communities of MDI were hit hardest mainly because of a series of utility poles on the Route 3 Trenton bridge that snapped early Sunday morning.

Those poles were repaired Sunday evening, but many outages remained throughout the island, particularly in residential, off-the-beaten-path areas.

“It takes some time when the outages are scattered around like that,” Brooker said.

Bar Harbor Assistant Fire Chief Joey Kane said Tuesday that the town was prepared to house residents in emergency shelters, but so far, no one had requested assistance.