Cleanup and power crews were making steady progress Tuesday recovering from Sunday night’s heavy snowstorm.

As of 9:30 p.m., Central Maine Power Co. had surpassed its goal to cut customer outages to fewer than 30,000 by the end of Tuesday. Power had been restored to more than 80 percent of the 130,000 customers without service at the peak of the storm Monday morning. An estimated 21,975 customers remained without power.

In the greater L-A area, 1,625 homes and businesses were still in the dark as of 10 p.m. Tuesday; 14,755 in Brunswick; 1,515 in Bridgton; and 1,075 in Augusta.

Being without power for 48 hours and living in the more rural setting of Lisbon, Nate and Nadine Williamson decided to buy a generator, helping them cope with the outage. They weren’t prepared for one of the largest tree limbs in their yard to fall on their house.

“The damage was minor, but let me say getting that limb off our house was a challenge. That thing weighed a ton,” Nadine said.

Nate got stunning photos when the storm was over. The irony of the havoc and the beauty was not lost on his wife.

“It’s hard to believe something so beautiful can be so disastrous,” she said.

Michelle Leonard of Mechanic Falls worked through the storm and came home to a cold house Monday morning. Her husband was out plowing and their son was at his grandmother’s where Leonard decided to leave him because her mother has a wood stove.

“I went to bed, freezing, and by the time I got up, my husband came home and it didn’t look too promising where our power was concerned,” Leonard said.

They rented a generator from a local hardware store so they would have heat, and at 9 a.m. on Tuesday were glad to have power restored after 32 hours.

“It probably wasn’t as long as some people, but I tell you what: It is so easy to take for granted every day the little things in life – heat, running water, flushing your toilet, flicking on the light, so I guess it is OK once in awhile to go through times like this. It put things back in perspective,” Leonard said.

Anyone interested in staying updated on CMP’s progress can go to its Web site at centralmainepower.com under outages, or call the hot line at 800-696-1000 for progress reports.

Jon Elie, manager of the Lewiston Highway division, said that crews were barricading roads and diverting traffic due to downed wires and tree branches during the storm.

“It was one of the worst storms we’ve experienced in quite a long time,” Elie said. “Wires were sagging down and not allowing our trucks to pass underneath. There were streets not getting plowed for that reason.”

Two Lewiston plows and a sander were out of service during the storm, challenging city workers further, as main arteries like Sabattus, Lisbon and Main streets had an accumulation of packed snow that plows could not effectively clear.

A better part of the day was spent widening narrow neighborhood streets where high snow banks had prevented plows from pushing the snow off the roads. Snow removal during the daytime hours will concentrate on roads with four lanes, allowing for traffic to flow freely, and most other streets are scheduled for nighttime removal.

Elie said this was the 13th plowable storm and they’ve had 26 sanding situations so far this season.

Warming centers in Lewiston at the Jubilee Center at Trinity Episcopal Church and in Poland at the Ricker Memorial Library were open Tuesday. Neither Lewiston nor Auburn police departments had received calls from people without power or looking for shelter as of early Tuesday evening.