While thousands of Mainers remain without power this weekend, utility crews are making progress to bring homes back online.
The spring nor'easter knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of customers mostly in York and Cumberland counties.
About 130,000 outages were reported as of noon Saturday.
York County has about 42,000 outages and Cumberland County has 38,000 impacted customers. Thousands of outages are impacting customers in Oxford, Androscoggin Lincoln and Kennebec counties. Hundreds of utility customers are impacted in Hancock, Waldo and Knox counties.
In Portland, city officials said ongoing work to clean up from the ice storm on March 24 has been complicated by the damage from the nor'easter this week. In total, the city received more than 400 reports of tree damage, with some damage taking more than a day to remove.
"Our focus remains on hazards and some brush will remain on the roadside and in the parks until hazards have been addressed," officials said in a statement. "Crews have made progress on cleaning up brush and branches, but there is still at least a month of work to do before all debris is removed from the right of way."
York and Windham were among the hardest-hit communities in terms of power outages, with York leading the state in outages for much of the day on Thursday.
As of Friday morning, York still had more than 7,600 customers without power. On Beech Ridge Road, a broken telephone pole dangled across the road, supported only by the wires it was connected to. One local resident said she believed the transformer on top of the pole was still live, along with the wires.
Other back roads had similar problems, with wires sagging under fallen limbs or trees. On Ogunquit Road, a common conduit through the back rods to York from other parts of the county, a fallen tree blocked the entire road. Not far away, on North Village Road, another tree was leaning on wires. Sawhorses had been placed blocking the lane, but vehicles were driving around and under the wires anyway.
In a message to customers, CMP said it had “pre-staged” more than 450 line and 250 tree crews Wednesday evening in anticipation of the storm.
Road travel is slow going in some locations, with debris, including tree limbs and entire trees blocking or partially blocking some roads.
On Friday morning, New England 511, a website that tracks state route closures, reported at least seven road closures due to downed trees, power lines or both, stretching from Augusta south through the Lakes region to southern York County. The website also reported closures or partial closures due to flooding in Greene and Monmouth.
The Cumberland County Sheriff's Office issued a statement Thursday reporting one accident related to the weather involving a cruiser. Police said Irenge Mubonzi, 44, while driving a 2018 Jeep Wrangler on Roosevelt Trail in Windham, struck a sheriff's department cruiser driven by Deputy Danae Durost.
No injurires were reported, but police said Mubonzi was going around a tree in the roadway when the accident occurred.
The Maine Emergency Management Agency's website has expanded its list of warming centers to 46, in communities throughout the state.
Maine government offices opened at 11 a.m. Friday. The reason for the delay was because of hazardous travel conditions and widespread power outages, according to a directive from Gov. Janet Mills.
Central Maine Power company says on their website that given the scale of storm damage they expect power restoration to be a multiple-day effort that may last into early next week for customers in hardest hit areas.
The company says damage assessment is key to efficient restoration. Once the right crews and equipment for the job are assigned, they will then have an estimate of when power is likely to be restored.
This is a continuing story and will be updated.
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