Almost half of Waldoboro lost power during the night on Feb. 25, and for the majority of those homes it was off until late on Feb. 28, said Waldoboro Emergency Management Director Kyle Santheson.
“We’re a mess over here,” Santheson said in the morning of Feb. 26. “The trees were selective about hitting big feeder lines.”
The power went out at around 7 p.m. Feb. 25, Santheson said. At the peak of the outages, there were more than 50 roads without power in Waldoboro, Santheson said.
As of March 1, there were no roads closed and only sporadic reports of the power being out, but there is a week of clearing debris ahead, Santheson said.
“Thankfully, it’s not bitterly cold, and a lot of people in Maine are pretty self reliant,” Santheson said.
The gusting wind snapped the tops off of two electrical poles on Bremen Road in Waldoboro near the intersection with Old County Road at around 1 a.m. Feb. 26, said Waldoboro residents Tom and Sally Morrison.
“I was watching out the window, waiting for the tree in our front yard to fall, when the top of the pole exploded into a big ball of fire,” Sally Morrison said.
Crews arrived to clear the live wires and secure the area “a minute or two after the poles came down,” Sally Morrison said on Feb. 26.
On March 1, she maintained her praise for the company’s recovery efforts.
“CMP was Johnny on the spot. The crews working on our road were down from New Brunswick,” she said.
The big maple she was watching in front of their home at 701 Bremen Rd. did eventually fall – right after they moved from their bedroom in the front of their house to a room in the back, she said – and it bounced off their roof, smashed the awning over their porch and landed on their Honda Accord.
“We moved [the car] over next to the porch to get it away from the tree on the side of the house,” Tom Morrison said. “If we had parked where we normally do, it would have been fine.”
The Morrisons were without power until late on Feb. 27, but were in high spirits throughout the ordeal.
“Oh, we’re fine,” Sally Morrison said on Feb. 26. “We’ve got a fire going, we’ve got gas so we can cook – it’ll be like camping out. It could have been a lot worse. The tree didn’t go through the house; it didn’t break any of the new triple pane windows we just put up.”
She echoed that sentiment on March 1, saying that they’re in “great shape.”
“We’ve been to the dump a few times and the yard is pretty cleared up,” she said. “It’s not too bad except for the smashed car.”
The roof over the front section of their house was damaged and half of their porch will have to be replaced, “which is a shame because we just redid it last summer,” she said.
The Honda is totaled and there was significant damage to a bay window, but on March 1, that wasn’t her biggest concern.
“Sure, the maple fell, but my poor lilac is one third the size it used to be,” she said.
The biggest problem that the lack of electricity caused for the Morrisons is that the sump pump that keeps their basement dry shut down.
Within a few hours they had a generator running the pump, but the basement filled with several inches of water.
“It’ll have to dry out, and there was some damage,” Sally Morrison said. “But we can see the floor now.”
In the aftermath of the storm, the Morrisons still have work to do, and they don’t know yet how much the damage will cost to repair. They survived and pressed through with relatively high spirits, despite this being one of the most destructive storms they’ve seen for some time.
“We’ve lived here for 26 years, and that was windiest it’s ever been,” Tom Morrison said. “All in all, we’re doing alright.”
