LEWISTON – A damaged power line on Sylvan Avenue caused chaos and frustration Thursday evening as lights went out at homes and businesses and traffic lights went out.

“Right at rush hour,” said Lewiston police Lt. James Minkowsky. “That’s the worst time for something like this to happen.”

One woman suffered minor injuries in a two-vehicle collision at East Avenue and Russell Street moments after the lights went out at 5:30 p.m. Police believe the collision was the result of immediate confusion caused by the loss of traffic lights.

While fire and power crews wended their way to Sylvan Avenue, police and public works crews went to the most heavily clogged intersections to direct traffic.

The entire length of Russell Street and all of East Avenue were without power as a result of the blown transformer. A portion of Sabattus Street was also dark. All intersections in between those streets were without traffic lights.

“It was extremely busy there for a while because a lot of our officers had to rush to one geographical location,” Minkowsky said.

A long line of stalled traffic lined a half-mile stretch of Russell Street in the minutes after the outage. It was the same situation on East Avenue, which was dark all the way to Lisbon Street.

Police officers moved from one intersection to the next, setting up barricades of waving through traffic. Particularly troublesome were the areas of Campus and Sylvan avenues, Russell and College streets, Sabattus Street and Campus Avenue and East Avenue and Bartlett Street.

A half-hour after the lights went out, traffic began moving in a slow but orderly fashion. An hour after the transformer blew on Sylvan Avenue, power was restored to many of the affected neighborhoods. The rest were back online shortly after 7 p.m.

In the meantime, lives were disrupted in the area of the blackout. Employees at businesses like Elizabeth Ann’s and Rite-Aid on Sabattus Street locked their doors and turned customers away as gas pumps, cash registers and coolers stopped working.

On Sylvan Avenue, in a home near the downed power lines, Tonya Stevens and her daughters sat on the steps, watching the activity around them. Stevens said she had started baking bread in the oven shortly before the lights went out.

“Now,” Stevens said, “it’s just a big old lump in the oven.”