Portland, Maine. Crews were still trying to restore power in Maine and New Hampshire on Saturday, where more than 100,000 homes and businesses remain in the dark after a storm with winds and snowfall.
Maine’s power company warned that some locations will not have power until Monday or Tuesday, despite the efforts of 1,125 electrician crews and 400 tree-cutting crews. Most of the outages — more than 150,000 on Saturday morning — were in southern Maine, while in New Hampshire more than 100,000 homes and businesses remained without power.
Central Maine Power reported receiving more than 5,000 reports of damage and more than 300 power poles were broken, said Jonathan Breed, a company spokesman.
It’s been a tough winter and spring in Maine, the most forested state in the nation. About 450,000 homes and businesses lost power in a storm in December, and about 200,000 lost power in an ice storm last month. More than 300,000 homes and businesses were left without power in the most recent storm, which occurred between Wednesday night and Thursday morning.
Such storms have become more frequent and intense in the past decade, Breed noted.
“There are these stronger, more frequent storms happening everywhere. That’s something we attribute to climate change,” Breed said Saturday. “Of course that explains the trend.”
The storm dumped heavy rain and winds across much of the North American Northeast — including winds gusting over 60 miles per hour (97 kilometers per hour) in parts of New England — following storms that spawned tornadoes and flooding further west.
More than a foot of snow fell in New England in some places. In total, about 700,000 people were without power at one point in New England, following the biggest April storm there since 2020.
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– 2024-04-14 21:45:48
