From staff reports

LEWISTON – The April Fools’ Day flood of 1987 swept away bridges, washed out roads and swamped houses.

That’s not likely to happen this year. However, there is potential for serious flooding this weekend, said Tom Hawley, a National Weather Service hydrologist.

The odds are “better than 50-50,” he said Thursday. “It won’t be as bad as 1987, but it could be worse than anything we’ve seen since.”

The wild card is the temperature. If it stays cool, less snow will melt in the mountains at the headwaters of major rivers such as the Androscoggin, he said.

Less rain is expected, too.

The National Weather Service is predicting 3 inches for Saturday.

That’s significant, but it’s less than half of the precipitation that fell in many areas between March 30 and April 2, 1987.

That year, rainfall ranged from 4 to 8 inches, with the highest amount reported in Blanchard, a tiny town on the Piscataquis River north of Guilford.

Forecasters say we’ll get less rain this year, but the snow is deeper where it counts: in the mountains.

As of March 29, a small area near Rangeley Lakes had more than 12 inches of “equivalent water content” in its snowpack, according to the Maine Emergency Management Agency Web site.

Eighteen years ago, the mountain snowpack was only 6 to 8 inches, Hawley said.

Despite the deeper snow, there isn’t much chance of the kind of flooding that brought the Androscoggin 10 feet above flood stage in 1987.

“We don’t expect that,” he said.