By Mark LaFlamme,Staff Writer

AUBURN – A single lightening strike from a fast moving-storm Friday night knocked out electrical power in Lewiston-Auburn and surrounding towns.

At about 9 p.m., thousands of homes and businesses went dark as heavy rain fell outside. A Central Maine Power Co. official said the outage was due to downed wires and damage to a substation from the strike.

The exact number of outages was not known. Customers in Auburn, Lewiston, Minot, Turner, Greene and Leeds were affected, CMP reported.

Auburn appeared to have suffered the largest outage, with police scrambling to intersections to control traffic in areas where traffic lights were no longer working. Other officers went to a number of businesses where alarms had been activated by the power surge.

“The traffic problems isn’t too bad, but we have a lot of alarms coming in,” said Auburn police Lt. Eric Audette.

Businesses around the Auburn Mall went dark, including several restaurants where customers were eating and stores where people were shopping.

Neighborhoods on either side of Court Street were completely black, as was a long stretch of Center Street and the area around Lake Auburn.

The CMP outage Web site reported nearly 100 streets in Auburn alone where residents had called to complain of blackouts.

In Lewiston, a stretch of Main Street from Russell Street into Greene was in the dark. Half of the power was restored by 10 p.m., the rest was expected at 11 p.m.

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