FORT KENT — Not since the ice storm of 1998 left thousands of Mainers without power have repair crews seen damage like what followed last weekend’s snowstorm in central and Down East Maine.
“We have a 37-year [repair crew] veteran who’s retired, and we brought him back in to help,” Scott Richardson, transmission and district supervisor at Emera Maine, said last week. “He told us this was the worst he had seen in his career.”
Wet, heavy snow piled up as high as 17 inches in some of the hardest-hit areas east of Bangor
The storm hit Nov. 2, and by that Sunday afternoon power outages were mounting as the heavy snow and wind gusts snapped tree limbs, pulling down power lines.
By Monday, repair crews from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were heading to Maine to help restore electricity to more than 140,000 homes.
By Thursday, there were 400 Emera crewmembers working to get the power back on. Susan Faloon, Emera spokesperson, said late last week that most customers were expected to have the lights back on by Friday.
Hit especially hard, said Richardson, were Blue Hill, Brooksville, Cape Rosier and Deer Isle-Stonington.
“I went up [by helicopter] on Monday,” he said. “From the air, we could see we had multiple transmission lines out and trees down across lines.”
Before crews could be sent in, he said, Emera personnel had to first inspect and assess the damage.
“We had to know where to send those crews,” Richardson said. “That assessment can be really time consuming.”
For the most part, he said, customers were understanding.
Faloon and Richardson did say they realize that for customers without power, any amount of time can seem like a long wait for it to be restored.
Some residents were critical of Emera’s response, alleging the company had fewer linemen employed since Bangor Hydro merged with Maine Public Service to become Emera Maine.
“There are just as many linemen under Emera Maine as there was before under Bangor Hydro [and] Maine Public,” Faloon said. “In fact, the Bangor Hydro District can now draw on linemen from the Maine Public District and vice versa, so we already have more lineworkers on staff even before an event.”
The storm knocked down about 85 poles, she said, 13 of which belong to FairPoint.
“We have as many field workers as we can safely manage,” Faloon said. “It’s more a matter of the time it takes to make repairs.”
It can take up to four hours to replace just one pole, she said.
“In some cases, we have multiple trees on the same line, [and] in one case, there were 10 trees on one line,” Faloon said.
She said the ongoing strike of unionized FairPoint communications workers has had no adverse impact on the pole or transmission line repairs.
Poles can be replaced, but a number of the area’s trees took a major hit from which there may be no recovery.
“I saw big spruce knocked over with their roots uprooted,” Richardson said. “We had to go in and take care removing or moving those trees before repair crews could go in.”
Morten Moesswilde, Maine Forest Service district forester out of Jefferson, was on the ground last week surveying the damage first-hand.
“There was considerable tree damage, especially where trees were out in the open and exposed,” he said. “Where there was the combination of heavy snow, high winds and wet, saturated soils we had limb breakage and trees topple.”
This was particularly the case along roads and the edges of fields, he said.
“I’m still spending time going around and looking at different places,” he said on Friday. “I am sure there is a lot more damage out there.”
The heaviest damage, Moesswilde said, appeared to be in the midcoast area in Knox and Waldo counties.
“There were only a few spots the damage was on a multi-acre basis,” he said. “Mostly it was losing a few trees in many spots.”
Most of the trees that were damaged, he said, were already suffering from other ailments or weakness.
“With the balsam [firs], you have generally weak root systems that can cause them to topple in high winds,” he said. “With the hardwoods, a fork in the tree can be a weak point where you see large branches breaking off or the entire tree splitting.”
Adding to the troubles, the early season storm meant many of the non-coniferous trees still had their leaves, on which the heavy snow was able to collect.
Damage such as broken trees and branches, Moesswilde said, is really more of a problem near residences where falling trees and limbs can hit homes or power lines.
“In the woods itself, it was really only significant in a few, isolated places,” he said. “It doesn’t look great, but it’s not a huge issue in terms of [forest] recovery.”
Trees, he said, can survive limb breaks or even trunks splitting, but he cautioned that trees with significant damage can be a hazard near homes or buildings.
“If you are a homeowner and half of a remaining tree becomes a risk, it’s often not a good choice to leave those trees around,” he said. “If it’s just one large limb or a few small branches, the trees can recover.”
As bad as the damage does look in some areas, Moesswilde said it was not as bad as the 1998 ice storm.
“There were a couple of places that had the same magnitude of damage as we saw in 1998,” he said. “But on a regional basis, it was not of that magnitude.”
There won’t be much of the wood worth salvaging on a commercial basis, Moesswilde said, but he did say homeowners will likely be looking for timber worth saving.
“There will be some branch wood going into firewood piles,” he said.
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