The entire town of Harpswell remained without power early Monday, March 25, following a mixed-precipitation storm that dumped about 6 inches of snow on the Midcoast region, along with sleet and freezing rain.
According to Central Maine Power’s online outage list, all 4,760 Harpswell customers had been without power since early Sunday. It said power might not be restored until Tuesday in some areas.
“So far today, we have restored power to nearly 50% of the 202,000 customers affected and we have repaired damage to all transmission lines and substations,” CMP’s website said Monday morning. “We have more than 350 line crews on the job now with more line and tree crews arriving tonight and tomorrow. We are working 24×7 until all of our customers have their power restored.”
The Harpswell Town Office was running on generators Monday and would be available to residents as a warming and charging center until 4 p.m., said Michael Drake, the town’s fire and emergency management administrator.
Drake said town emergency crews logged 15 major hazard incidents Sunday, mostly related to downed trees and power lines.
“At one point (early Sunday), all access to the town of Harpswell was blocked until the fire departments were able to get out and get some of the trees cut up,” he said. “It was just the weight of the ice … it pulled everything down. The last (storm) we had like this was back in 1998.”
Drake urged residents to exercise caution when venturing out, and to be mindful of the presence of CMP crews out on the roads working to restore power.
According to PowerOutage.us, about 100,000 of Maine’s 850,000 power customers remained cut off as of mid-morning on Monday. The highest shares of outages were in Cumberland, Sagadahoc and Lincoln counties.
As of 5:30 p.m. Monday, there were still about 4,250 Harpswell CMP customers without power.
Harpswell and Maine have experienced multiple major storm-related power outages over the past few months, including on Dec. 18, Jan. 10, Jan. 13 and March 10.
