At daybreak Monday, more than 25,000 Maine residences and businesses were without power due to the first major snowstorm of the season.

National Weather Service forecasted 8 to 12 inches of snowfall for a portion of northern New Hampshire and upper-western Maine, while most of the rest of the state faced 5 to 10 inches, and 2 to 5 inches, or a dusting, toward the coast.

The storm more or less delivered according to NWS data Monday morning.

While the timing and scope of the storm is not anything unusual to Maine’s late fall, Pine Tree Weather’s Mike Haggett said the storm was kind of an odd setup.

Prudence Iyakaremye gets whacked with a snowball that was thrown by her 9-year-old daughter, Eleonora Uwase, on Monday morning in Lewiston. Uwase and her sister, Thekla, had the day off from school as public schools in Lewiston and Auburn were canceled because of the snow that fell Sunday night into Monday. Daryn Slover/Sun Journal

“The system was kind of flat, there wasn’t a lot of wind, and the ocean level dragged moisture up from the south. I don’t want to say it was a garden variety storm considering the mountains got 12 inches of snow. Without the wind, it was an odd storm where everything lined up just right to dump,” Haggett said.

As a result, government buildings, libraries and municipal offices were closed, and schools closed or delayed, from the furthest reaches of Oxford and Franklin counties to the fringes of Androscoggin and Kennebec counties and beyond.

In Androscoggin County, Auburn, Lewiston and Maine School Administrative District 52 schools were closed for the day as was the University of Southern Maine Lewiston-Auburn campus. Lisbon Schools had a two-hour delay and no morning pre-K.

Androscoggin County Sheriff Eric Samson said deputies responded mostly to slide-offs and that there were no serious accidents. Auburn Police Deputy Chief Tim Cougle said officers responded to four accidents with no injuries between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Oxford County Sheriff Christopher Wainwright said there were no accidents of note.

Androscoggin County had a diverse range of snowfall during Maine’s “first real storm of the year,” according to NWS’s data, from a 3-inch coating in Durham to over 8 inches in Livermore Falls. Turner reported about 8 inches between 7 and 8:45 a.m. and Lewiston and Auburn accumulated about 5 inches of snow overall from the storm.

Rodney Austin plows his driveway Monday morning in Wales. “I have been waiting for it to snow so I can get out my snowmobile,” said Austin. The tractor that Austin plows snow with is homemade. The rear end and motor are from a 1946 Ford truck. The front end is from a 1954 Ford. Daryn Slover/Sun Journal

Coming in with the most snowfall in Maine, according to NWS data, were Newry in Oxford County which reported 11.6 inches at 8 a.m.; Strong in Franklin County, 11.5 inches at 9:22 a.m.; and Rangeley, 12.2 inches at 7 a.m.

By midafternoon, over 16,000 were still waiting to have power restored, over half of the outages in Oxford County, and by press time, there were around 3,393 still waiting.

As of 6:30 p.m. Monday, Central Maine Power reported 2,859 customers without power in Oxford County, 607 in Franklin County and just 13 in Androscoggin County. A major improvement from the 8,923; 1,478; and 478, respectively, around 1:30 p.m.

In Oxford County, Bethel, Fryeburg and Waterford had the bulk of the outages earlier in the day, but the smaller towns were hit hardest with Upton, Stow, Mason, Hanover, Gilead, Byron, Bridgton having most or all of its CMP consumers without power as of 1:30 p.m. — 1,000 customers out of 1,139 total between all the towns. By 6:30 p.m. all but 405 customers in Stow, Gilead and Bridgton were restored.

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