Brunswick Patrol Officer Gretchen Paxton directs traffic at Maine and Pleasant streets in downtown Brunswick on Wednesday. A power outage that affected approximately 2,400 Central Maine Power customers also knocked out traffic signals for more than two hours. (Darren Fishell / The Times Record)
Aside from cases of melting gelato and sorbetto, the cash register system was down, and they resorted to handwriting receipts.
Then Davis thought of Square, a credit card App for his iPhone, and they were back in business, scooping the frozen confections throughout the three-hour blackout.
“It was an adventure for a while,” Tropeano, who with Davis co-founded the downtown hot spot, said today. “We didn’t lose too much product. We set up candles in the back and we stayed open the whole time.”
Not so for Eveningstar Cinema owner Barry Norman, who was getting ready to screen Wednesday’s first showing of “A Separation” when the lights went out.
With no way to run his projector, he decided to walk, with his dog Scooter, past darkened storefronts like Bull Moose music, toward construction at the top of Maine Street, but the cause wasn’t there.
CMP spokeswoman Gail Rice said a lightning arrestor at the Bangor Hydro Electric Co. substation on the Androscoggin River failed, leaving approximately 2,400 customers in the area without electricity.
Meanwhile, Brunswick police officers directed clogged traffic up and down Maine Street throughout the afternoon, and dispatchers toiled in a dimly lit police station fielding queries about the outage and redirecting emergency vehicles along side streets.
According to a Twitter report from the Bowdoin Orient, the outage also postponed a blood drive in the college’s student union.
Adding to traffic confusion, just before 2 p.m., a Brunswick ambulance en route to a call was struck by another vehicle while stopped in traffic amid construction on Bath Road near First Parish Church.
No one was injured, Deputy Chief Marc Hagan of the Brunswick Police Department said, and another ambulance was directed to the call.
Electricity was restored in waves throughout the afternoon, beginning at 2:45 p.m. on parts of Maine Street.
All power was back by 3:30 p.m., Rice said.
news@timesrecord.com
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
