In the wake of the state’s worst ice storm in a decade, Central Maine Power Co. warned Saturday that power may not be restored in southern and coastal Maine until well into next week.

But in the Lewiston-Auburn area, the number of households without power Saturday night was down to 80, compared to 5,700 the day before.

“We expect to have most of those 80 restored by the time people wake up in the morning,” CMP spokesman John Carroll said Saturday night.

The exception was the Lisbon area. In CMP’s grid, Lisbon is serviced by the Brunswick area. Brunswick, Portland and other coastal areas were hit much harder by the storm.

“We can’t even begin to say when the Brunswick service will be back up. We’re not trying to give any prediction yet,” Carroll said.

When CMP restores power, those living in more populated areas get power back before those in outlying areas, Carroll said. “That’s how our system is designed. We have to fix the primary roads first.”

Meanwhile, people with Time Warner digital phone service may be experiencing no service, even if they have electricity.

Edward Walworth of Lewiston said he switched to digital phone service with Time Warner on Thursday. About an hour after Time Warner left his home, he lost service due to the storm.

With digital, when there’s no power, there’s no phone service. But Walworth said he never lost electricity. He called Time Warner. “They said they’re working on it,” he said. “Thank goodness for cell phones.”

A recorded message at Time Warner said the company was experiencing widespread outages in Maine and New Hampshire due to the storm.

In South Portland on Saturday, Gov. John Baldacci and CMP President Sara Burns met with police, fire and other officials to talk about efforts to restore power.

The storm was “kind of a mini version” of the ice storm of 1998, Baldacci said. A decade ago, the storm was a statewide event with rural areas particularly hard-hit. This time, the storm was concentrated in more populated areas of southern, central and coastal Maine.

Burns said the utility learned some lessons from the 1998 storm that helped this time around, but as bad as conditions have been this weekend, they pale in comparison with 10 years ago.

She said the ’98 storm, at its peak, cut power to 340,000 Maine customers, while this year’s ice storm topped out at 220,000. Ten years ago, about 2,600 utility poles snapped and had to be replaced, while only about 100 were broken in this storm.

As of Saturday morning, 172,000 homes and businesses in CMP’s service area were without power. The goal was to bring that number down to 100,000 by late Saturday, Burns said.

Bangor Hydro-Electric said nearly 1,300 of its customers are still in the dark, most of them in Penobscot and Piscataquis counties. It expected everyone to be back in service by Saturday night.

Between 150 and 200 people statewide spent the night in shelters after losing their power. About 18 shelters were open, most of them in southern and coastal Maine. Because Androscoggin County made it through the storm relatively unscathed, no shelters were set up.

Temperature readings and progress in restoring electricity to those without power will likely determine how many people use the shelters Saturday and Sunday, according to the Maine Emergency Management Agency. Overnight lows were expected in the lower teens and single numbers in most of the hard-hit areas.

Thousands of residents of nearby states like New Hampshire and Massachusetts also lost power in the storm, so they couldn’t send help to Maine. But crews from other states arrived Friday, and others from Canada and Michigan arrived Saturday.

In addition, Bangor Hydro sent some of its workers south to help out, because storm damage was much less severe in Down East and northern parts of the state, Burns said.

Baldacci signed an emergency declaration before anyone’s lights even flickered, and CMP initiated storm work rules, which call for line crews to put in 17 hours of work before taking off seven hours to eat and sleep.

Burns said the utility also set up a help line for workers that allowed them to call one number for “a pole, a bucket truck, a toothbrush, anything.” Dozens of workers were “runners,” whose job it was to collect those items, while other CMP staffers arranged motel rooms and food for workers.

Edward D. Murphy of the Maine Sunday Telegram contributed to this report.