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More than 16,000 Central Maine Power customers still without electricity after weekend storm

Ice on trees and power lines in Cape Elizabeth on Sunday.
Jennifer Rooks
/
Maine Public
Ice on trees and power lines in Cape Elizabeth on Sunday.

Central Maine Power says it had 400 crews working Monday to restore power knocked out by Saturday's storm.

Utility spokesperson Jonathan Breed says work was completed Sunday on repairing damage to CMP substations and major transmission lines. Breed said that was "key," with one transmission line sometimes serving "thousands of individual customers."

Breed also says the utility will try Monday to post estimated restoration times that individual customers can access on the web.

He said it took time to assess damage from the storm.

"In some cases it's simple: It is a branch on a line. In other cases it's much more complicated," Breed said.

In those instances, Breed said the utility needed to create a work plan involving multiple teams with different skills, which made estimated the time of service restoration difficult.

Saturday's storm ended with hours of freezing rain in parts of southern Maine. Icing contributed to power outages that affected just over 200,000 CMP customers. As of 6:30 a.m. Tuesday, just over 16,000 customers still had not gotten electric service back.