With up to a foot of snow expected to have fallen across Maine by Thanksgiving day morning, "be careful" is the message to anyone venturing outside.
Gov. Paul LePage ordered state offices closed at 1 p.m. Wednesday and urged motorists to drive slowly, keeping a safe distance from other vehicles. In Maine's biggest city there was a similar message for reside"
"So we'd really like to encourage folks to leave as much time as possible to reach their destination, “ said Portland city spokesperson Jessica Grondin.
She said public service crews will be working overnight and into Thursday, clearing more than 560 lane-miles of road and about 100 miles of sidewalks and trails. She said residents should park off-street where possible to allow snow to be cleared from the sidewalks as efficiently as possible.
Snowplows are also out in force on state highways. The Maine Turnpike has about 75 plows in the field.
“We have all of our crews out along the road plowing and putting treatments such as salt and sand, as needed, and we expect that they will be working around the clock well until tomorrow morning to try to keep up with the roads," says Turnpike Authority spokeswoman Erin Courtney.
Courtney recommends that drivers stay off the road completely, as snow is expected to be coming down at a rate of about an inch per hour at the height of the storm, and that is faster than crews can keep up with.
Maine’s utility companies are also braced for more outages. CMP spokeswoman Gail Rice said the company has spent the past few days making sure it has all the resources ready to handle the storm
“We've been making sure that our trucks are fuelled up and equipped and that we've enough people here to respond in case we have any trouble calls,” she said
Emera Maine spokesman Bob Potts said the company, which supplies more than 150,000 customers, has recalled employees from vacation and has additional crews on standby.
“Everyone is just kind of waiting and watching just like our customers,” he said.
Both companies are urging customers to say away from downed power lines and to contact the utilities if outages occur.