Severe thunderstorms, lightning strikes in Naples and Bridgton, reports of funnel clouds near a Poland Spring bottling plant in Hollis, and a tornado touching down in a heavily populated Boston suburb capped a wild day of weather Monday in northern New England.

The National Weather Service in Gray said Monday afternoon that it had received multiple reports of a funnel cloud or possible tornado passing through the towns of Hollis, near the Poland Spring bottling plant on Killick Road in Hollis Center, Standish and Limington.

Meteorologist Margaret Curtis said the reports started coming in late Monday afternoon, soon after the weather service issued a tornado warning for that region.

Emergency crews were sent to a stretch of Route 117 from Hollis to Limington and found nearly two dozen trees uprooted and knocked over.

Power lines were also knocked down.

Blaine Cote, York County’s Assistant Emergency Management Agency director, said a team from the National Weather Service will visit Limington on Tuesday to determine if a tornado or a microburst had struck the region.

“We don’t know yet if it was a tornado,” Cote said. “The weather service will determine that.”

Cote said the powerful storm packing strong winds pushed through the area along Route 117 around 4:30 p.m. Monday. Cote was told that trees landed on two homes. No injuries were reported.

Curtis, the meteorologist, said the weather service team will assess the damage to determine whether a tornado struck Limington.

The weather service is also investigating whether a small tornado formed over land late Sunday afternoon on the northern end of Sebago Lake in Raymond.

Curtis said Maine averages one to two confirmed tornadoes a year.

The Cumberland County emergency dispatch center confirmed that one person was struck by lightning around 5:05 p.m. Monday at a campground on Long Lake in Naples.

Beth Brown, a co-owner of the Four Seasons Family Camping Area, said the teenage boy was transported to a local hospital. Brown said the youth was able to stand and was talking to his parents.

He did not appear to be seriously injured, Brown said.

Lightning also struck a home at 378 Highland Road in Bridgton around 8 p.m. Monday. The Bridgton Fire Department responded, but no injuries were reported. The home sustained minor damage.

All of York, Cumberland, Oxford, Androscoggin and Franklin counties remained under a severe thunderstorm watch until 8 p.m. Monday.

Thousands of Central Maine Power Co. customers were without electrical service Monday as a result of the storms, most of them concentrated in Oxford, Franklin and Kennebec counties.

Curtis said a severe thunderstorm dropped 2 inches of rain on the town of Jay over a period of two hours Monday night. The rain washed out several roads.

The weather to the south of Maine was even wilder, according to a report from The Associated Press.

A storm system that wreaked havoc across the eastern half of the U.S. spawned a tornado that ripped roofs off homes north of Boston, uprooted trees and forced businesses to close.

The tornado, a rarity in Massachusetts, touched down in Revere, a coastal city of nearly 52,000 residents, on Monday morning. City officials said several people suffered minor injuries, including a baby who was in a car and was hurt by flying glass and an elderly woman who suffered cuts.

“Given the magnitude of the storm, it’s really a miracle that no one sustained more serious injuries,” Mayor Daniel Rizzo said.

The tornado was spawned by a powerful storm that moved through the Boston area shortly after 9 a.m., causing significant flooding. The National Weather Service said it was a relatively modest EF-2 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale of 0 to 5.

The tornado carved a 2-mile path, generated maximum wind gusts of up to 120 mph and was about three-eighths of a mile wide at its peak, the weather service said. It touched down at 9:32 a.m. near the Chelsea-Revere line and was on the ground about four minutes.

Rizzo said 65 homes and businesses were damaged, 13 of them left uninhabitable. He said about 2,800 residences were without power but many were expected to have it restored by midnight.

The city opened a temporary shelter for displaced residents.

Gov. Deval Patrick said state officials would “do whatever we can to help.”

The weather service said it was the first tornado in Suffolk County, which includes Boston and the northern communities of Revere, Chelsea and Winthrop, since it began keeping records on them in 1950. It said Massachusetts has had 162 tornadoes during that time, the majority of them weak.

Rizzo said it was too early to estimate the cost of damage from the tornado, which affected an area of three square miles.

Officials were going door to door in the most hard-hit neighborhoods around Revere Beach Parkway and Broadway, the city’s busy commercial corridor.

Paul and Patty Carrabes said they were at work when the wind tore the roof off their Revere Beach Parkway home.

“I probably would have died if I was in there,” Patty Carrabes said.

About a block over, Luis Fonseca said emergency warnings came too late. By the time a tornado warning popped up on his cellphone, he said, he was already running to the basement with his niece and nephew as windows shattered and the wooden house swayed from side to side.

Other residents said they received the warnings roughly 10 minutes before the tornado hit, giving them enough time to find shelter.

Rizzo agreed that it “could have been nice” to get more notice to make sure residents were out of harm’s way.

“This isn’t something we’re used to in the City of Revere,” he said.

 

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