About 25,000 Emera Maine customers in central and southern Aroostook County lost electricity Monday afternoon, after a tree fell on a transmission line connected to neighboring New Brunswick.
Power went out a little after 4 p.m. Monday for all customers from Island Falls north to Caribou, and returned for everyone by 5:45 p.m., according to Emera spokesman Bob Potts.
“A tree fell from outside of the right-of-way, taking down the transmission line that feeds the region from New Brunswick,” Potts wrote in an email.
Because the outage affected streetlights, local police officers were out directing traffic through many of the busier intersections in the impacted areas. Many stores were also unable to conduct business and closed their doors for a short duration.
Some 25,000 customers were initially taken offline and the company used a “rolling restoration” process to return electricity via different circuits.
“It takes time to do this but it’s the quickest way to get people back on line while the line workers are patrolling the lines and substations to determine the cause,” said Potts in an e-mail.
“Between system operators manually re-routing circuits and our line crews scrambling to repair the damage, it wasn’t out nearly as long as it could have been,” he wrote.
