Thousands of Central Maine Power Co. customers were still without power one day after another early winter storm dropped snow, rain and slush over most of Maine.
Nearly 4,000 customers had no power as of 5 p.m. Wednesday, according to CMP’s outage reporting website. Most of the outages concentrated in Oxford County.
The Oxford County towns of Brownfield, Fryeburg, Lovell and Stoneham had the most outages. Cumberland County reported the second most outages with the towns of Bridgton and Naples being the hardest hit.
Fryeburg had opened a shelter at the Molly Ockett Middle School late Tuesday night that was staffed by Red Cross volunteers. The shelter closed Wednesday.
The storm Tuesday dumped 12 inches of snow in Kingfield, 8 inches in Bethel and 7.5 inches in Raymond. Coastal areas had to deal with a mix of snow, sleet and rain that produced a lot of slush and some flooding.
Most of Tuesday’s outages were caused by heavy, wet snow on tree branches and power lines, said Kevin Elwell, CMP’s director of electric operations. On Tuesday morning, during the height of the storm, CMP reported that 25,000 customers lost power.
More than 12,000 CMP customers reported having no power during the early morning hours of Wednesday. Restoration efforts made progress on Wednesday, but crews still faced challenges.
“Continuing snow squalls continue to cause road access and driving visibility issues. We are getting to places as soon as we can,” CMP said in a tweet Wednesday afternoon.
Dennis Hoey can be contacted at 791-6365 or at:
dhoey@pressherald.com
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