From the Portland Press-Herald:The state's worst ice storm in a decade left 220,000 homes and businesses in southern and central Maine without power on Friday, sending some residents to emergency shelters and leaving roads and properties scattered with downed trees.
The widespread damage means s
ome customers face days without electricity, and temperatures today are expected to stay below freezing.Much of the Northeast was blanketed in ice, leaving 1.25 million customers in the dark from Pennsylvania to Maine. Especially hard-hit was New Hampshire, where power was knocked out to 400,000 customers.
Maine remained in a state of emergency, giving utility crews the authority to work beyond their usual hourly limit, and permitting crews from other states and Canada to come to the state to help.
Efforts to restore power were mostly delayed Friday afternoon while utility crews cut power to downed lines so emergency workers and passers-by wouldn't be injured. But by Friday evening, the number of outages had started to decline significantly.
"We're getting to the point where the 'make safe' is almost done and we've got the power to hospitals stabilized," said Gail Rice, a spokeswoman for Central Maine Power Co., the state's largest utility. "Now we can start getting a better assessment and begin restoration starting at the core of our system, the substations and transmission lines, and moving out."
At 9 p.m., CMP said about 190,000 customers were without power, including 83,530 in the Alfred service area, 42,220 in the Greater Portland service area, 37,980 in the Brunswick area, 5,045 in the Augusta area and 4,200 in the Bridgton area.
Friday's outages were the most in Maine since the ice storm of 1998, when 270,000 homes and businesses – or an estimated 600,000 people – were without power.
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