Winds wallop southern Aroostook

  HOULTON, Maine — A brief, yet powerful storm struck southern Aroostook County May 26, felling numerous trees and causing power outages. Packed with heavy rain and strong gusty winds, the storm hit the Houlton area around 3:30 p.m., dropping numerous trees and branches.     According to John Clark, general manager of Houlton Water Company, 1,700 customers were without power for several hours last Tuesday because of the storm. The company has 5,000 total customers.
Clark said the event was one of the worst summer storms his company has seen in the past 25 years.
“Unfortunately, I was in Augusta when the storm occurred,” Clark said. “I say it’s unfortunate, because I actually enjoy that [storms]. It’s a challenge and I enjoy challenges.”
Power outages were widespread, Clark said.
“We have a sub-station in Cary Mills which services Drews Lake, New Limerick, Linneus and Hodgdon, that was knocked out,” Clark said. “That seems to be the area that was hit the hardest. In town, we had our inner-circuit, which is Bangor Street south to the sub-station, and that was out too.”
Clark said the HWC crew did an “outstanding” job responding to the storm.
A total of 10 workers, from both the electrical and water divisions of the company, were out at the storm’s peak. Clark said the majority of those without power were back online by 9 p.m., but workers were still busy Thursday and Friday working to remove branches from power lines to prevent further damage.
“The whole thing came and went in about 20 minutes,” Clark said. “I have been here 25 years and we have had other kinds of storms, but I don’t think we ever had one like this. We’ve had ice storms and fall snowstorms, but this was the worst we have ever had in the summer.”
Clark said Carleton Wallace, the electrical superintendent for HWC, told him it was the worst storm he had seen as well.
According to Mark Turner, service hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Caribou, the storm featured wind gusts up to 60 mph and heavy rains, while traveling at a high rate.
“It was a pretty impressive storm front,” he said. “Basically it had a bow shape to it, which happens when you have super acceleration of a storm. We tracked the storm front at 55 knots [more than 60 mph]. It seemed to have its focus right in the Houlton area.”
Turner added there was no evidence of tornado activity from the storm.
“This was a pretty classic wind event,” he said. “There was no rotation to the front, which is an indicator of tornado activity.”
That information differs from the story told by Melanie Lainey of Sherman, who contacted the Houlton Pioneer Times Tuesday afternoon describing what she thought was a tornado. Lainey lives in a farmhouse on Route 2 in Sherman.
“It came right through a potato field, across the road,” she said. “We saw it form in the sky and it touched down and shot across our yard. It took down two trees, spun them around and then threw them.”
Lainey and her two children were outside at the time of the storm. Her children were the first to spot the storm, but they were unable to reach the safety of their home before it struck. She said the wind lifted a cold frame – a raised flowerbed, with a covering – off the ground and slammed it into her daughter’s vehicle.
“It spun that thing around like it was nothing,” she said. “We couldn’t even get into the house because there was so much dust and debris in the air that we couldn’t even see our house. We were probably only 30 feet away from the house, but we couldn’t see it. It happened so fast.”
Lainey added the storm followed a very narrow path through her yard.
Damage in Houlton was relatively minimal. Several vehicles were struck by falling tree limbs, particularly in the Court Street area, according to Houlton police reports. Court Street was closed for two hours when a tree owned by Paul Romanelli toppled into the street, blocking both lanes. No injuries were reported.
The home of Shelly Sylvester on the South Townline Road in Hodgdon was damaged when a massive willow tree was uprooted and fell onto her house. Sylvester was not home at the time of the incident.
“I was on my way home when my son called,” she said. “He came to close the windows for me, and he found the willow tree had fallen on the house. My first reaction was ‘maybe it’s not that bad.’ But it was.”
The tree, which Sylvester said was 40 years old and stood nearly 50 feet high, was lifted out of the ground by its roots and resting against the side of her house when she arrived.
“Nothing came through the house and amazingly no windows were broken,” she said. Sylvester did not have an estimate as of May 26 on the damage as her insurance company had yet to arrive at her home.
Sylvester added her neighbors John and Amanda Williams brought a generator for her to use since she was without power.
Internet service not affected
Internet service surprisingly was not affected by the storm, according to Tim McAfee, chief technical officer for Pioneer Broadband.
“Any issues on the Pioneer Broadband network yesterday [Tuesday] were caused by power outages with the exception of a microwave link in Presque Isle that bounced in and out of alignment for approximately 15 minutes,” he said. “The core of the Pioneer network remained intact throughout the storm. One of our upstream providers had a short-lived issue during this time, but our Internet connection into Canada held our traffic for the duration of the lost upstream provider.”
He added approximately 700 cable customers due to power outages caused by downed trees (the cable system has powered amplifiers every 2500 to 3000 feet) and about 300 wireless customers in various smaller POPs were affected due to power outages caused by downed trees.
“The longest outages were on our Drew Hill broadcast facility in Linneus which was four hours,” he said. “As of 9 a.m. today (Wednesday), we are still on our generator. Eastern Maine Electric has been notified, but they have plenty of cleanup to attend to. This storm was particularly interesting since it approached from the North and only lasted for a few minutes. There are an unprecedented number of trees toppled in southern Aroostook from this short burst of heavy winds. We have never seen a storm like this before.”