Central Maine Power Co. crews continue working to restore power to thousands of customers across the region, days after an early-season winter storm blasted the area.

About 2,880 customers were still without power as of 9:43 p.m. Wednesday, according to the CMP website. That was down from a peak of 84,000 Monday morning. 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, continue to have the most outages. More than 2,500 of the remaining outages were in those counties. 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.

She said outages were expected to 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 the mid coast 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 mph, brought down trees, limbs and lines.

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