By early Sunday evening, about 7,655 customers of Central Maine Power Co. were still without electricity after a large wind storm knocked out power across much of the state early last week, according to the utility’s website.
The largest clusters of customers in the CMP service area still without power were in Lincoln, Cumberland and Kennebec counties. Jefferson, Winthrop, Monmouth, Nobleboro and Brunswick were among the communities with the most outages.
A CMP spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request for comment Sunday afternoon.
That number, 7,655, was down more than two-thirds from the 28,000 reported outages 24 hours earlier, but it was still a long way from the total restoration of power the company’s executives said on Saturday that they were trying to achieve this weekend.
“The team aspires to have 100 percent, but we also want to be realistic and honest and want the customers to know what we are thinking about this,” said Sara Burns, the utility’s president and CEO, in a conference call Saturday morning. “There is a great debate in this building today. The debate is around 10,000. As many as 10,000 could still out at the end of today, but we aspire for it to be much lower.”
Almost 500,000 customers lost power across Maine in the wind and rain that arrived early on Oct. 30.
Emera Maine, which transmits power across the northern and eastern part of the state, was reporting just over 700 customers without power Sunday evening.
In the conference call Saturday, CMP officials said restoring power will be uniquely difficult for about 1,200 customers because they live on islands or because equipment that’s on their property has been damaged.
“There’s been enormous damage in some towns,” said Doug Herlin, CMP’s vice president of electric operations. “Those towns require an enormous amount of work.”
The company also said that more line workers would be on the road this weekend than there have been all week, as it’s taken time for reinforcements to arrive from Canada and states all the way down the East Coast.
Some roads that CMP estimated would have power by Saturday night were still without it on Sunday. Earlier this week, the company acknowledged to the Portland Press Herald that some of the data on its website might not be accurate.
Matt Gorman, a Wayne man whose power was still out Saturday, used two words to describe his feelings about the subject: “It sucks.”
Charles Eichacker — 621-5642
Twitter: @ceichacker
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