HOULTON, Maine — When the power went out for a few hours on Friday, Fred Grant said that he wasn’t going to risk fighting the “chaos and traffic” in a dimly lit town with residents heading out of town to either eat or find power.
So he repurpurposed one of his daughter’s Yankee Swap gifts — a headlamp — and turned on the barbecue to cook dinner.
A blown insulator at one of the substations that supply power to Houlton was cited as the cause of the widespread outage that lasted from about 4:45 to 9:15 p.m. Friday.
Greg Sherman, general manager for Houlton Water Company, said Monday morning that while identifying the fix was relatively quick, it took nearly four and a half hours for utility crews to complete the repairs because the substation is owned by Emera Maine.
“An insulator failed inside a switch at Mullen substation on the Ludlow Road,” Sherman said. “Mullen substation is owned by Emera Maine, so we had to contact their system operator. We quickly identified what was going on, but since most of what is inside is theirs (Emera’s), they are responsible for safety and switching parts out.”
Working inside a substation also takes time, he added, “because you have to make sure everything is de-energized,” Sherman said.
Some area residents just made the best of it.
Grant said that his family frequently makes pizza on the grill, and they had all of the ingredients ready on Friday.
“The only thing I had to do was to find the light to cook it,” he said. My daughter got a Yankee Swap gift of a headlamp last Christmas. I do not believe that she had ever used it. So I put it on and took out the pizza and cooked it. It tasted terrific. I invited my mom over and we all played cribbage.”
Hanna Williams of Houlton said that she was in the middle of charging her iPad when the lights flickered out.
“I was sitting there ready to watch one of the movies that I wanted to see before the Oscars on Sunday,” she said Monday. “I was halfway through renting it when everything went dark.”
Williams, 48, said that she was “slightly bummed,” but decided to read instead. That lasted only an hour or so, she said, because the book was on her iPad.
“I eventually decided to join some friends who were playing Monopoly by candlelight,” she said.
Mark Henderson, another Houlton resident, said that he “wanted none of that.”
“I sat around the house for about an hour hoping it was going to come back on,” he said, laughing. “Then I gave up and drove to a friends house in Littleton for the rest of the night.”
Pioneer Times writer Joseph Cyr contributed to this report.
