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Linemen walk back to their trucks the morning of Dec. 26 after breaking fast at Moody’s Diner in Waldoboro. (D. Lobkowicz photo) |
By Greg Latimer
Updated Dec. 25 at 3:35 p.m.
After an ice storm that never seemed to end, thousands of Lincoln County residents were coping with power outages that may continue through Friday, according to a Christmas Day
report from Central Maine Power.
A total of 4329 Lincoln County households spent Christmas morning without power, according to CMP. That number had been reduced only slightly to 3904 by 3:04 p.m., according to
CMP.
As the Christmas Day sunshine began to fade, it was likely that many of these homes will remain without power through a night with low temps forecast at 13 degrees, despite the
best efforts of CMP.
In a statement issued at 11 a.m. on Christmas Day, CMP advised that it has increased its storm recovery workforce to 1,800 in its efforts to repair damage from the ice storm
that struck Maine on Monday morning.
The utility estimates that more than 123,000 customers have lost their power at some point since the icing that began early Monday.
“With the addition of the crews who arrived last night (Christmas Eve), we increased our counts to 455 line crews and 330 tree crews,” said CMP spokesman John Carroll. “Today
(Christmas Day), we’ll have at least one full restoration team on every circuit serving every community where we have outages.”
CMP expected to reduce the number of outages statewide to fewer than 30,000 customers on Christmas Day, which would cut the number of outages by half from the count late on
Christmas Eve. CMP also projected that the vast majority of customers will have their power restored by late Thursday night, although the restoration may stretch into Friday for
some customers in rural or inaccessible areas.
CMP crews have been working for days to maintain the power grid, both during and following an ice storm that arrived early Sunday morning and continued to affect the area
through Monday night. Even with the storm passing, subfreezing conditions have hampered the efforts of CMP crews as well as increasing the possibility of additional outages.
There were 7103 customers in Lincoln County without power on December 24, according to CMP. Most of those are in Jefferson with 1765 outages reported, followed closely by
Whitefield with 1210. Nearly every Lincoln County town had outages, according to CMP.
The power outages came is two waves. The first was on Sunday when 1047 Lincoln County homes lost power, with power restored to all but 44 residences by nightfall, according to
CMP. The second wave of power outages came on Monday, with over 5000 households without power by the afternoon, according to CMP. Power had been restored to 1454 households by 7
p.m., according to CMP, with 3564 remaining without power. That number climbed again on Tuesday morning to the current figure of 7103, according to CMP.
The Lincoln County News will continue to follow the progress of this event and post any additional information here as soon as it is obtained.
