Powerful storms bear down on Maine

“It was raining cats and dogs, and maybe a cow or two,” Rumford Police Dispatcher Tracy Higley said after a downpour in the western mountain town. Heavy rain was also reported in Paris and other towns and there were numerous reports of wind and lightning damage, the National Weather Service said.

A funnel cloud was reported in Bridgton, where trees were uprooted by high winds. Kirk Apffel of the weather service office in Gray said a team will be sent to the site Friday to inspect the damage and determine whether a tornado had hit the area.

Central Maine Power Co. reported more than 3,000 outages late Thursday afternoon affecting customers from York County in the south to Dover-Foxcroft in Piscataquis County.

“What we’re getting now is widely scattered, but we’re keeping an eye on it pretty closely,” said CMP spokeswoman Gail Rice.

The weather service said thunderstorms across much of Maine could produce up to 2 or 3 inches of rain in some areas, large hail and damaging winds that could reach 70 mph. Flood and tornado watches were in effect in most of Maine excluding Down East.

Earlier in the day, power was restored to most of Bangor Hydro-Electric’s service area after eastern Maine was left in the dark due to suspected lightning strikes, but wind from the second wave of storms was causing hundreds of new outages by late afternoon.

More than 118,000 customers lost their electricity shortly before 8 a.m., said Bangor Hydro spokeswoman Susan Faloon, but nearly everyone had service back by late morning. With the second blast later in the day, 224 outages in scattered areas were reported, Faloon said.

Bangor Hydro’s service area covers Penobscot County, including the state’s third-largest city, Bangor, along with most of Hancock and Washington counties and part of Piscataquis County. At the height of the morning systemwide blackout, the only area that was spared of outages was small section of Eastport that was powered off a small generator.

“Street lights, traffic lights, you name it,” said Faloon.

Faloon said the outage was believed to have been caused by a pair of lightning strikes, but said it could be several days before the exact cause is known. The earlier storms brought 2 inches of rain to parts of the state, the weather service said.

Faloon said the utility was able to restore service to its coverage area quickly due to ther benefit of revised procedures and technical improvements following ice storms a decade ago that wrecked much of the state’s power distribution system. Bangor Hydro had restored service to most of its customers by about 10:30 a.m., well ahead of noon when it initially anticipated it would get everyone back up.

“The fact that we were able to go from nearly every customer except a few in Eastport from having no power back to having power in a couple of hours I think is pretty amazing,” Faloon said.

While the Bangor Hydro service interruption was at its worst, Gov. John Baldacci issued a statement urging the region’s residents to remain calm.