A power outage that affected thousands of customers in Franklin County struck Sugarloaf and briefly stranded skiers on the resort’s lifts in chilly temperatures Tuesday.

A representative of the Carrabassett Valley resort said skiers were on the idle lifts for 5 to 10 minutes around 2:30 p.m. before workers could switch over to auxiliary power to run the lifts and get people back down to the ground.

“It was probably pretty chilly for the people who were up there,” said Ethan Austin, director of marketing for the resort.

Jason Morais, of Milford, Massachusetts, was riding one of the resort’s lifts when it halted. He told the Morning Sentinel in a tweet that the lift stopped about halfway up the slope and stayed for a while. He said the lift started moving again by 2:30 pm or so.

“I was dressed for super cold weather so I was all right,” he said.

The resort put out a statement on Twitter that power had been restored to the mountain shorty before 5 p.m.

Austin said Sugarloaf closed its lifts for the day after bringing down the rest of the customers. He said that if the outage had not been resolved by Wednesday, the resort could have used auxiliary engines to operate some of the lifts at the resort.

The resort was just one of 2,444 Central Maine Power customers affected by the outage in Carrabassett Valley. There were a total of 7,263 customers in Franklin County and 2,571 customers in Somerset County without power just before 5 p.m. Tuesday.

A dispatcher for CMP said the cause of the outage was not yet known and a company representative didn’t immediately return a call seeking those details.

 

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