The vast majority of the roughly 5,200 Maine households that were without electricity late Saturday night are expected to get power back by Sunday evening, said a CMP spokesman.
Since Thursday, a total of 490 additional crews – made up of roughly 1,000 individuals – have been added to CMP’s 100 crews to work on restoring power – with 233 independent crews coming from across New England, 147 from Canada, and 50 from Avangrid’s New York and Connecticut offices, said Mike Jamison, communications manager with Avangrid, which operates CMP for the multinational Spanish company Iberdrola. Another 60 Maine-based crews joined the effort, Jamison said, bringing the total team of individuals working to restore power in Maine to about 1,200. He added that some out-of-state crews arrived in Maine on Wednesday night, in advance of the storm.
A severe nor’easter swept through Maine on Thursday, softening root-binding soil and lashing trees, which dropped limbs on power lines. Roughly 180,000 of CMP’s 646,359 customers lost electricity that day, but the number was down to 32,707 by late Friday night.
“Those out-of-state crews will stay until it’s done,” Jamison said. “We pre-staged additional crews when we saw the forecast for Wednesday night. They’ve been coming ever since. The bulk of them came Thursday and Friday.”
As of 9:30 p.m. Saturday, 5,244 total CMP customers were without power – including 1,411 customers in Cumberland County, 2,486 in Lincoln County, and 1.262 in Sagadahoc County. In York County – where 1,528 were without power in the afternoon – just two remained in the dark later in the evening, according to CMP’s online outage list.
Emera Maine, the electric utility serving northern and eastern Maine, reported 261 customers without power Saturday night. Hardest hit were the communities on Mount Desert Island.
At 9:30 p.m. Saturday, just 10 of Portland’s nearly 39,000 CMP customers lacked electricity. On Chebeague Island – where all 582 customers were in the dark Saturday afternoon – 200 were without power by the evening – but Jamison said they all would have power restored Sunday.
The city of Portland announced Friday it was opening warming shelters for those without power: the Reiche Community Center at 166 Brackett St. and the Riverton Community Center at 1600 Forest Ave.
The Riverton shelter closed at 8 p.m. Saturday, and will be open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Sunday. The Reiche center closed at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, and will be open Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
On Peaks Island, the community center lobby will be open 24 hours through the weekend, city spokeswoman Jessica Grondin said.
Elsewhere in Cumberland County, Harpswell had 979 of 4,646 customers – or 20 percent – without power at 9:30 p.m. Saturday, while Freeport and Brunswick both had more than 100 in the dark.
Farther up the coast in Lincoln County, 372 customers in Boothbay and 1,026 in Bristol were without power Saturday night.
At many local restaurants near Harpswell, a swell in business continued – but at some longtime establishments, owners said they’re used to such outages.
On Bailey Island in Harpswell, it was business as usual at Cook’s Lobster and Ale House, said owner Nick Charboneau. He said going without power was par for the course along the coast of Maine – and their generator kept them running and open throughout the outage.
“Business has probably been a little busier today, but it hasn’t been crazy. Most of the people on Orr’s Island and Bailey’s Island got power Friday afternoon. It’s the other side of Harpswell where people are without power still,” Charboneau said.
In Brunswick, the long wait for power was felt at Cameron’s Lobster House.
“I expect at dinner there will be quite a rush tonight, because there are still so many people in the area without power,” server Jamee Matthews said Saturday afternoon.
And at the Dolphin Marina and Restaurant, located 12 miles down Harpswell’s western-most peninsula, owner Billy Saxton echoed Charboneau’s sentiment: Working along the coast of Maine, you get used to power outages – and the staff at his restaurant was.
“Our phone lines are down. So I’m talking to you on my cellphone. We’ve had to make some adjustments. But we’re trucking right along. We’re at the end of a peninsula. We are accustomed to losing power,” Saxton said.
Some CMP customers have had difficulty tracking their power status online. CMP’s outages map was offline early Saturday morning, but was restored within a few hours.
Jamison said Saturday that the website jams were caused by the company’s frequent updates to power restoration time estimates, and noted that they’ve been corrected.
“Restoration times are quickly being moved up because of the progress that’s being made,” he said.
Among the crews from out of state joining Maine utilities’ efforts to restore power, 15 were from Hydro-Quebec and comprised roughly 40 people.
An October 2017 storm cut off power for nearly half a million Mainers, spurring calls for CMP to shift its immediate response toward safety-oriented work such as clearing roads for emergency vehicles.
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