HOULTON, Maine — High winds and heavy rains wreaked havoc on the busy holiday weekend as Tropical Storm Arthur made its way across Maine Saturday.
An estimated 20,000 customers of Emera Maine and an additional 5,200 from Houlton Water Company were without power for varying lengths of time in southern Aroostook and northern Penobscot and Washington counties as the remnants of what was once Hurricane Arthur made its way across the state. The entire town of Houlton was without power for a 45-minute window, while other areas endured much longer outages. Littleton was without power for more than 24 hours.
Bridgewater had a high gust of 46 miles per hour, and Houlton maxed out at 44.
Most of the outages were caused by tree limbs, and in some cases entire trees, falling onto power lines.
“In my 30 years with Houlton Water Company, I would put this storm in my top three,” said John Clark, president of HWC. “We knew we had a storm coming, but we didn’t realize how bad it would be. We try to anticipate the big storms and ask our workers to be available.”
From Danforth to Bridgewater to Patten, strong wind and heavy rain struck the area. The high winds from the storm also caused some damage to metal roofing at the Houlton International Airport hangar.
“I don’t have an estimate at this time, but the damage is substantial,” said Butch Asselin, interim town manager for Houlton. “Public works cleared the road of the debris. The town has insurance to cover the loss and there was no damage to any aircraft.”
He added some water did seep through the roof and noted a contractor has been called to provide an estimate.
Asselin said it was undetermined when the roof would be repaired.
Clark said as Saturday progressed, the conditions became worse and worse. Members of the line crew were supplemented with workers from the water and sewer division. He estimated crews from HWC worked until 12:30 Sunday morning correcting all of the various outages.
“The electric transmission coming south, which is owned by Emera Maine, suffered an outage, which took us completely out,” Clark said. “We were fortunate we didn’t lose many poles. We had some streets that were worse than others and were without power overnight. Charles Street was hit especially hard, as were the French and Hemore roads.”
Clark said clean-up work is ongoing and some areas may lose power for short periods of time as more permanent fixes are completed.
Emera Maine officials said crews and contractors were out in full force again Tuesday as they worked to restore power to as many customers as possible. Progress had been slow, as outages were scattered and system damage was widespread and severe.
An estimated 34,893 total customers were affected by power outages during this storm and crews have made significant progress overall restoring power. As crews, assisted by helicopter patrols, made their way through the service territory yesterday they found more broken poles, damaged trees and fallen power lines than originally anticipated. This affected estimated restoration time and it is now expected to be the end of the day Wednesday before power will be restored to all customers.
