Line crews continued working to restore power to thousands of customers across Maine Wednesday, three days after an early-season winter storm blasted the area.

Emera Maine reported 10,754 customers without power last Wednesday

About 2,887 Central Maine Power customers were still without power late Wednesday, according to the CMP website. That is down from a peak of 84,000 Monday morning. There were a total of eight customers in Kennebec County without power, all in Windsor. CMP expected to restore power to everyone in Kennebec County by Wednesday evening, said CMP spokeswoman Gail Rice.

The midcoast counties of Knox, Lincoln and Waldo, where the storm was most severe, continued to have the most outages. The storm initially knocked out power to more than 80 percent of the homes and businesses in those counties. Customers in Dresden, Jefferson and Somerville in Lincoln County were without power, as were homes and businesses in Burnham, Freedom, Thorndike, Troy and Unity in Waldo County.

“An estimated 166,000 customers across all 14 counties served by the utility lost service at some point during the storm,” Rice said.

More than 260 line crews, 100 tree crews and hundreds of additional people are working on storm recovery, Rice said.

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She said outages should be reduced to fewer than 2,000 customers by Wednesday evening in the hardest-hit areas.

“Those remaining outages would affect isolated customers in seasonal homes, islands or inaccessible areas of Hancock, Knox, Lincoln, Penobscot and Waldo counties,” Rice said.

Sunday’s storm dumped about a foot of wet, heavy snow across midcoast and eastern Maine and several inches across interior central Maine, leadings to hundreds of crashes across the state. The snow, coupled with winds that blew in excess of 40 miles per hour, brought down trees, limbs and lines.

Craig Crosby can be contacted at 621-5642 or at:

ccrosby@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @CraigCrosby4

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