Utility crews restore power to most of state, including Aroostook County

5 years ago

BANGOR, Maine — Crews from Emera Maine have successfully restored power to most of the nearly 60,000 people across the state who lost power Monday night into Tuesday morning due to high winds and big gusts, according to utility company outage maps.

The National Weather Service in Caribou issued a warning about sustained westerly winds of 20 to 30 miles per hour with gusts of up to 55 mph through Tuesday afternoon for northern Maine. An advisory for the rest of the state called for sustained winds of 15 to 25 mph hour with gusts up to 45 mph through mid-afternoon.

The winds blew down trees and limbs on power lines causing outages statewide.

Emera Maine officials, who reported more than 12,000 customers without power in its territory at one point Tuesday, had restored power to all but 2,010 by 5:10 p.m., according to the outage map on its website. Scattered outages of just a few homes remained across Aroostook Tuesday night but all customers in The County had power restored by Wednesday morning.

As of 8:45 a.m. Wednesday, Emera reported only 87 customers, scattered around Piscataquis, Penobscot and Hancock counties, were still in the dark.

In southern Aroostook County, numerous trees had fallen on power lines, causing various disruptions to service in the greater Houlton area, according to Greg Sherman, general manager of Houlton Water Company. Most of those outages were corrected by 10 a.m. on Tuesday, Sherman said.

Central Maine Power,, which had reported about 55,000 customers without electricity at about 9 a.m. Tuesday was down to only about 5,100 outages around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. Those included about 1,200 in each Franklin and Oxford counties and about 1,500 in Somerset County.