At the Aubuchon Hardware store in Lisbon Falls, customers weren’t buying snow shovels.

Yet.

“I think people are still in shock,” store manager Corey Vachon said Friday. “In my experience with this sort of thing, they’ll wait until it’s here and then figure out either a) they can’t find their shovel or b) that their old one is broken. There’s not a lot of planning until that first one hits.”

That might be soon.

The National Weather Service in Gray issued a winter storm watch for Saturday evening — meaning 6 or more inches of snow could fall — for Androscoggin, Kennebec and a half-dozen other coastal and southern Maine counties including southern Oxford and southern Franklin.

“Right now, looking at some of the latest guidance coming in, I’d say 6 inches looks like a safe bet,” meteorologist Tom Hawley said. “It’s going to be probably a bit wet, might stick to trees. I can’t rule out a scattering of power outages. There will be a fair amount of wind with it.”

Because the storm is coming from the south and the wind will be blowing from the northeast, it will be a “nor’easter,” Hawley said.

Seem early for a nor’easter? It is.

The October snowfall record for Portland is 3.8 inches set in 1969, 3.6 of that from one Oct. 22 storm.

“It’s surprising to see something like this so early in the season,” he said. “Normally, it might be another two months before we would see something that would dump that kind of snow on us.”

Snow is forecast to end by 8 a.m. Sunday with clear skies during the day. Anything left on the ground won’t be around long.

“(Temps) will be in the 50s by the middle of next week,” Hawley said. “It should be OK for Halloween night, shouldn’t be any problem there.”

Auburn Public Works Director Bob Belz interviewed applicants for five job openings Friday that included snowplow driving. Last week, his crew had a winter refresher course, getting re-familiar with routes and sanding and salting priorities.

“Last year, (the first big snow) was during rush hour, so it was the worst possible time,” Belz said. “For a first snow, the first time driving for some drivers, (Saturday night) is probably the optimum timing.”

In Norway, the highway department spent Friday on last-minute preparations.

Road Commissioner Ron Springer said crews prepared plows in case they had to attach them to trucks Saturday. Most of the work — painting the plows and installing plow frames — was already done. Springer said there was plenty of sand and salt and he’d have the staff on hand if the roads need plowing.

“Hopefully, it’s a sand-and-salt thing, but we’re ready to plow if we have to,” Springer said.

One bright spot to busting out the shovels now: Historically, Hawley said, a big storm early in the season has meant less snow, overall, during winter.

The Farmers’ Almanac, based in Lewiston, predicted stormy weather and “some wet snow” for the Northeast at the end of October.

Vachon at Aubuchon Hardware said he doesn’t typically stock up on snowblowers until closer to Thanksgiving, but the store still has two left from last winter.

“I’m happy I got my snowmobile all ready to go the other day,” he said.

Staff Writer Tony Reaves contributed to this report.

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