As the power outages from Monday's storm stretched into midweek, and winter temperatures returned, rural Mainers have been finding ways to stay warm and get by as best they can.
On Wednesday morning, Freedom resident Alyssa Wasik was in the town office, staying warm.
"We personally have a tree on our wires on our dirt road and then there's a bunch of trees on wires and some poles down and wires on the ground, down Belmont Road," Wasik said.
As the temperature drops, Wasik said her house is getting chilly.
"The past two days haven't been too bad, because the temperature was in the 50s or 40s, but today, yes, the house is cold," Wasik said. "So I decided to come down to town office to work on my work."
Over in Benton, Rocky Dixon was one of the people lining up to buy gas at a country store.
"It started Monday," Dixon said. "I lost power at 11 in the morning, so my generator's been running nonstop since then. All I do is come over here to get gas, that's been quite the experience."
Dixon said he's lived his whole life in Benton, and has never seen anything like Monday's storm.
"My basement's flooded, my sump pump's been running nonstop," Dixon said. "Me and my girlfriend basically, the last few nights, have been taking shifts. We sleep for an hour. She gets up, tends to the fire, makes sure the generator is full of gas. I get up the next hour, do the same thing. You know, repeat. It's been really stressful. I'm exhausted."
But Dixon said he's well aware that some have had it far worse. Harold Larrabee at Aghaloma Farms in Knox is among them. He and his family spent Wednesday loading their 420 cows into trailers after an early morning fire ripped through the milking parlor in a barn. He said it started with a fire on a tractor that had been running a generator.
"The tractor burned up first, it was just too close to the barn," he said. "So then it got in there, and the wind was blowing that way. By the time we got the fire trucks and everything, that's what she looks like."
Larrabee said they are sending their cows off to get milked at another farm that doesn't have cows right now. He said no people or livestock were injured in the fire. And around midafternoon Wednesday, CMP restored power to the farm.
