Central Maine Power has announced that all Lincoln County households still without power should have their service restored by Saturday night, according to a bulletin issued by the company at 4:30 p.m. on Friday.
According to CMP, there were 2575 Lincoln County customers still awaiting power restoration at the time of their Friday bulletin. Approximately 9000 Lincoln County homes were without power at the height of the storm in the early morning hours of Thanksgiving, according to CMP. Many of those households endured a Thanksgiving without electrical power.
Statewide, more than 157,000 homes and businesses lost power at some point between Wednesday night and Thursday morning as a Thanksgiving Day northeaster rolled through Maine. The peak number of outages reached nearly 104,000 around 8:30 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day.
“We have restored power to almost 95,000 customers since Thursday morning, and we will make more progress through the evening,” said Gail Rice, spokesperson for Central Maine Power on Friday. “By late tonight, we expect the remaining outages will be in Cumberland, Lincoln, Sagadahoc, and York counties, where we have been moving more and more of our crews throughout the day. We will still have scattered outages on Saturday affecting small groups of customers, especially on seasonal roads, peninsulas, islands, and other hard-to-reach locations.”
At CMP’s request, Governor LePage issued a Declaration of Emergency late Wednesday night that allowed 60 utility crews from Canada to drive longer hours during the night to join the restoration effort during the day on Thursday. Nearly 1,000 CMP employees and contractors worked through Thanksgiving Day and Friday.
