Not only does this tampering cut down on costs, it means that the hydro company doesn’t become suspicious of increased energy use – a telltale sign of possible illegal activity.

Daniele Gauvin, spokesperson with Hydro One, said the company now has an investigation team in place to track down energy thieves.

“Power theft is illegal and our Theft of Power Investigation Team looks for anomalies,” said Gauvin. “Thieves either manipulate the meter itself, to record the wrong information, or they bypass the meter altogether by connecting on the live feed before the meter.”

Hydro staff works closely with police, including Orillia OPP, to investigate suspicious activity. The company’s been called quite a few times to shut off power to houses containing suspected grow-op.

“Very often people who are stealing power are engaged in other illegal activities, for example, grow-ops.”

One way of tampering with a hydro meter was found online. It takes two magnets, one bigger than the other, some distilled water, an old a/c adaptor, electrical tape and a knife. Together, the items are used to slow the spinning of the meter’s dial.

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.