Cold blasts of wind continued to hamper crews Sunday evening as they worked on restoring power to thousands of Mainers.
Central Maine Power Co. issued an advisory at 5 p.m. saying that fewer than 2,000 homes in its service region were still without power.
Many of those homes were in York County. CMP said it would concentrate its repair crews there. But even with those crews laboring throughout the night, CMP said that as many as 750 customers could expect to go a second night without power.
Isolated outages also were keeping some in Denmark, Hartford, Industry, Lisbon, Lovell, Oxford, Turner and Wilton in the dark.
“At this stage, the restoration is very labor-intensive because the remaining outages are widely scattered. A crew can work several hours on a repair that brings only one or two customers back online,” said CMP spokesman John Carroll.
Still, the number of outages remaining was a marked improvement over earlier figures provided by the utility.
About 8,900 homes and businesses in its territory were without electricity close to midday Sunday, and that was down from a high of nearly 49,000 Friday night.
“We’ve made some really good progress,” said Kevin Howes, another CMP spokesman.
Bangor Hydro Electric Co. said its estimated number of meters without service was less than 50 as of noon Sunday. Most of those were in East Millinocket and Brooksville. At the peak of Friday’s wind storm, nearly 7,000 Bangor Hydro customers had service disrupted.
Freezing temperatures were being felt from New England to the Rockies.
Storms and cold weather were being blamed for five deaths.
The National Weather Service said that parts of Maine experienced the coldest temperatures of the winter season Sunday morning.
A low of 18 degrees below zero was reported in Allagash.
From Greenville north, early wind gusts ranged from 20 to 28 mph, generating wind chill values in the 15 to 27 below normal range, the weather service said.
Utility crews were still working to restore power to about 12,000 electric customers across New Hampshire.
Jim Van Dongen of the state Bureau of Emergency Management said the state closed its emergency operations center, two days after wild winds and hail caused power outages that affected about 100,000 homes and businesses around the state.
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