Power outages hit scattered sections of Washington and Hancock counties Thursday, turning off the lights – and in some cases, the heat – for nearly 10,000 customers amid blustery weather.

In some cases, the power wasn’t expected to be back on until this morning.

In Calais, a failure at an Eastern Maine Electric Cooperative substation affected more than 3,500 customers shortly before 11 a.m. Thursday and was expected to last 16 hours, company officials said.

That outage stretched from Calais to Perry, west to Route 9 and Randy’s Variety Store in Alexander.

Meanwhile, Bangor Hydro-Electric Co. said nearly 6,000 homes in northern Hancock and parts of Washington counties were affected, said LuAnn Williams, a Bangor Hydro spokeswoman.

She said the company had called in crews from Central Maine Power, Maine Public Service and others to help.

“What we have had is a substation transformer failure,” said Charlie McAlpin, Eastern Maine Co-op spokesman. “Because of the size of the transformer, we have to bring in a crane to move the spare transformer from [Baileyville] and it’s a complicated thing to install.”

McAlpin said the co-op was still investigating the cause of the failure.

Although Bangor Hydro said crews were working on the problem, it estimated that some customers would be without power overnight and into today.

Temperatures Thursday night were expected to reach as low as 10 degrees F. At 3 p.m. Thursday, the temperature was around 20.

Baileyville, Princeton and communities north of Calais were not affected by the outage. “But we also are looking at a situation where we have a developing weather pattern of high winds that may cause some additional outages,” McAlpin said.

Police Chief Michael Milburn said officials were concerned about the elderly and families with young children.