Some skiers were stuck for a few minutes on a halted ski lift in chilly temperatures at Sugarloaf Ski Resort Tuesday because of a power outage that affected thousands of customers in Franklin County.

A representative of the Carrabassett Valley resort said skiers were stuck in the air for about five to 10 minutes around 2:30 p.m. because of the outage before workers could get the auxiliary engines running to bring people back down to the ground.

“It was probably pretty chilly for the people who were up there,” Ethan Austin, director of marketing for the resort, said Tuesday afternoon.

Jason Morais, of Milford, Massachusetts, was a passenger on one of the resort’s lifts when it halted. He told the Morning Sentinel in a tweet that the lift stopped about halfway up the slope and stayed for a while. He said the lift started moving again by 2:30 pm or so.

“I was dressed for super cold weather so I was all right,” he said.

The resort put out a statement via Twitter that power had been restored to the mountain shorty before 5 p.m.

The resort was just one of 2,444 Central Maine Power customers affected by the outage in Carrabassett Valley. There were a total of 7,263 customers in Franklin County and 2,571 customers in Somerset County without power just before 5 p.m. Tuesday.

A dispatcher for CMP said the cause of the outage was not yet known and a company representative didn’t immediately return a call seeking those details.

Austin said Sugarloaf closed its lifts for the day after bringing down the rest of the customers. He said that if the outage had not been resolved by Wednesday, the resort could have used auxiliary engines to operate some of the lifts at the resort.

Emily Higginbotham — 861-9239

ehigginbotham@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @EmilyHigg

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