From staff and wire reports

By the time the last flurries ended Sunday morning, a slow-moving storm had dumped a foot or more of heavy, wet snow on much of winter-weary Maine.

As roadside snowbanks rose to monumental heights, the only hint of spring -it’s a mere week away, says the calendar – could be found at the Portland Flower Show.

Police in Lewiston and Auburn had responded to a flurry of mostly minor accidents over the weekend as snow slicked both the main and secondary roads. By Sunday evening, police were reporting that many roads had dried during the warmth of midday, but some of that melt water was expected to freeze over as the night air cooled.

“The roads may be cleared, but they’re not very wide,” said Auburn police Lt. J. Michael Lemay. “Ditto, ditto, ditto,” he added, “for all the other cautions we issued all winter.”

Across the Androscoggin in Lewiston, police Lt. Mark Watson said, “The roads are pretty good, almost dry.”

He said the city’s only recent accident involved a vehicle that slid into a snowbank then flipped on Lisbon Street late Sunday afternoon.

“There was no personal injury,” Watson said. “The driver got out and walked away.”

Weary road crews were catching up on some well-deserved sleep Sunday afternoon. Many were expecting to work later Sunday night sanding freshly refrozen road surfaces or beginning work on snow removal operations.

Because of road pollutants ranging from sodium to petroleum products, excess snow can no longer simply be dumped in area rivers. Now the crews have to haul snow off to “snow dumps” where it waits for the sun’s heat to melt it.

Dispatchers in Franklin and Oxford counties and at the Gray barracks of the state police said conditions were largely good, and each said there had been no serious accidents in their regions. No accidents involving snowmobilers were reported, either.

Speed limits on the Maine Turnpike and Interstate 295 were back to 65 mph after having been reduced to 45 mph during the storm.

Going into the weekend, forecasters had predicted accumulations of 10 to 20 inches in some areas. Snow began falling Friday night. It changed to rain and mixed precipitation in some places and even stopped completely at times. But the snowfall picked up after daybreak Saturday and reached its height at midday, when an inch or two an hour fell over much of southern Maine.

With accumulations from the latest storm, Portland approached the 100-inch mark for the season.

“It’s going to be close,” said John Cannon, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Gray. “I think we’re going to be right near that number.”

The weather service had recorded 89.6 inches of snow in Portland by noon Friday. The winter record is 141.5 inches in 1970-71, one of 13 years in which the city reached 100 inches in more than 120 years of record keeping.

Lewiston and Auburn and towns to the east and west of the Twin Cities often exceed the Portland snowfall amounts since precipitation tends to fall more as snow than rain in inland Maine.

Extreme northern Maine escaped the brunt of the storm, with about 2 to 4 inches predicted.

Because the storm arrived during the weekend, Maine avoided an additional day of school closings that already threaten to extend the school year in some districts to the end of June. The timing also spared motorists from another round of commutes over snow-covered roads.

A broad range of events were postponed because of the weekend weather, including many area town meetings, Sunday’s scheduled St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Portland and high school regional Class A basketball finals and state hockey finals.

The Portland Flower Show bucked the trend, though, remaining open as promised. By 11 a.m., nearly 800 people had come to the show along the city’s eastern waterfront.

“We’re shocked. We thought there’d be eight,” said Joanna Sprague, the show’s co-producer. “I think people are eager for spring.”

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service said another snowstorm could be coming later this week.

“But the computer models are flip-flopping on whether that’s going to come through or not,” Cannon said.

Staff writer Doug Fletcher and The Associated Press contributed to this report.