It could be several days before electrical power is restored to all of Maine, according to Central Maine Power spokesperson Gail Rice.
Rice said crews were concentrating Monday on assessing damage to the state’s power grid and repairing damage to high capacity power lines in the wake of Sunday’s Tropical Storm Irene.
“We restore from the core out,” Rice said. “We restore the transmission lines that serve substations first, then from the substations to the big three-phase lines that serve the centers of town and the larger number of customers and the highly populated areas. Then we move out to the service drops, between individual poles and somebody’s house.”
An estimated 275,000 CMP customers lost power at some point Sunday, and the company estimated that 183,359 remained without electrical service at 9 a.m. Monday.
York County had the most customers without service Monday with 46,110. Cumberland County had an estimated 37,542 and Kennebec County had an estimated 30,703 without service.
Androscoggin County had 19,586 customers without service Monday morning. Oxford County had 17,321 and Franklin County had 3,018.
All of those service outages were based on customer reports, Rice said.
“Our goal today is to be well into the assessment,” she said. “We may not even finish that today. We’ll be doing restoration as well. We have line crews out, putting things pack together. But it does take time to get it going. We need to know what we’re up against.”
Maine Electrical Outages, by county
York: 46,110
Cumberland: 37,542
Kennebec: 30,703
Androscoggin: 19,586
Oxford: 17,321
Lincoln: 7,144
Waldo: 6,000
Somerset: 4,540
Sagadahoc: 3,787
Knox: 3,232
Franklin: 3,018
Penobscot: 2,835
Hancock: 896
Piscataquis: 645
Maine Total: 183,359
Source: Central Maine Power Company
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