A total of 5,472 Central Maine Power Co. customers were without power for about an hour at the peak of the outage, from 3:05 to 4:12 p.m., according to John Carroll, a CMP spokesman.

Some 3,500 customers were without power for a longer period, starting about 1:30 p.m. They didn’t have power back as of 5 p.m. Sunday and Carroll said then it would likely be a few more hours before power was restored to those customers.

The towns affected by the longer outage included: Belgrade, Chesterville, Fayette, Manchester, Mount Vernon, Readfield, Rome, and Vienna.

The larger outage affected those towns as well as customers in Augusta and Hallowell.

The initial outage was caused by a limb coming down on a power line in Readfield about 1:30 p.m., Carroll said.

While workers were reenergizing a substation in response to that outage, a piece of equipment in a substation failed which, in turn, caused another substation to go down, too, at 3:05 p.m.