Storm brings all sorts of weather mayhem to western Maine

The April storm that moved into the region Wednesday night, as promised, was a whopper.

By dinnertime Thursday, 320,000 Central Maine Power customers were in the dark and efforts to restore power was slow going. Androscoggin County got particularly hard hit, with a full 37,000 homes and businesses still without power by late afternoon. More than 100,000 were out in Cumberland County.

All through the morning and into the evening, police, fire, power and municipal crews contended with an array of problems brought about by the storm. High winds made line work perilous. Tree limbs were down all over the place and city plow crews had to maneuver around them to get the roads clear.

Lewiston Public Works plow truck driver Danny May clears the intersection of Main and Sabattus streets in Lewiston on Thursday morning. May ran tandem with driver Rick Dubuc. Tandem is when two plow trucks are offset with one behind the other so that a larger portion of the road can be cleared of snow. Daryn Slover/Sun Journal

Police dealt with car crashes just about everywhere and the fact that many traffic lights were down didn’t help matters. Things were so bad in Lewiston that police put out an appeal to drivers to stay off the roads if at all possible.

By late afternoon Thursday, roughly 10 inches had fallen in the Lewiston-Auburn area, with surrounding areas reporting similar amounts. At 9 p.m., the National Weather Service in Gray reported that they had recorded just over 17 inches of snow.

As foretold, it was a heavy, wet snow — one local man described it as “like trying to move straight water” — which made cleanup more difficult. Even more discouraging, at 5 p.m. the snow was still coming down hard and weather officials were cautioning that the storm might linger into the weekend.

CMP officials, meanwhile, advised that some of the hardest hit areas may not see power restored until the beginning of next week.

“Given the snow load on trees over the interior, those numbers may nudge up higher,” said Mike Haggett of Pine Tree Weather.

Forecasters were calling for up to 2 feet of snow along the coast before all is said and done while other areas might see between 12 and 18 inches.

WILD WEATHER

At Lewiston Public Works, Highway Operations Manager Reggie Poussard described an all-hands-on-deck scenario as crews worked overnight to take on the storm.

“Every storm has it’s unique challenges,” Poussard said. “With this one, it’s definitely the wind and heavy snow and you’ve got trees and lines down all over the city.”

While road crews were out plowing and salting the roads, dispatchers at the Public Works headquarters on Adams Avenue were fielding call after call and directing workers to the latest trouble spot.

“We’ve been flooded with calls because of all the trees and wires down and all the different emergencies going on out there,” Poussard said.

While the storm raged on, the dispatchers stayed in constant contact with Lewiston-Auburn 911 Communications, working from spread sheets to track the various problems, from lines down to trouble on the roads that required immediate attention.

“They work really hard during these storms,” Poussard said. “Those phones are ringing off the hook the whole storm and those dispatchers are a vital part of our cleanup efforts.”

Rick Dubuc’s plow truck passes a stranded motorist on Grove Street during Thursday’s snowstorm in Lewiston. Dubuc said he plowed Grove Street four times between midnight and 9 a.m. Daryn Slover/Sun Journal

Some of the public works drivers were working through 16 hours shifts, trying to stay ahead of a storm that was still grinding on Thursday evening. Most of the main roads were more or less clear in the afternoon, but some secondary roads were particularly troublesome as downed trees hampered plowing efforts.

“The drivers are doing the best they can to go around things,” Poussard said. “But there are areas that we can’t plow until CMP goes in and removes the wires so we can safely get through.”

The wild weather also caused problems of a more dramatic sort.

In Sabattus, fire crews were called out shortly after 5 p.m. for a report of a singe-wide mobile home on fire on Wendell Way. Crews from Sabattus were being assisted at the scene by firefighters from Wales and Lewiston.

The home at 14 Wendell Way was described as fully involved when fire crews arrived at the scene, battling difficult conditions to get to the home.

There were no immediate reports of injury. Early reports were that the blaze was caused by an exploding propane heater, but an acquaintance of the homeowner later debunked that suggestion. The cause was being investigated later Thursday night.

IN THE DARK

By 5:30 p.m., the number of CMP outages was at about 320,000. In addition to the outages in Androscoggin County, 25,000 were in the dark in Oxford County and a staggering 105,000 were without power in Cumberland County.

In Lewiston and Auburn, the outages seemed strangely scattered. Whether or not you had power depended on where you happened to be.

A long stretch of Sabattus Street in Lewiston went unaffected by the outages while neighborhoods just a few streets over were in the dark all day.

In Auburn at about 3:45 p.m., neither McDonald’s nor Wendy’s on Center Street had power, but just a short way down the road, KFC was operating normally. Dunkin Donuts, also on Center Street, was fully powered but Burger King a short distance away was not.

Malo Street is one of numerous streets in the area closed due to the heavy and wet snow, which took down a tree and wires Thursday in Lewiston. Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal

Walmart on Mount Auburn Avenue had power throughout the day, but the store was eerily empty as the storm continued to make travel perilous.

The snow, still falling late in the day, was expected to continue into the weekend, possibly turning to rain at some point along the way.

“The faucet won’t completely shut off until Saturday afternoon,” wrote Haggett, in his Thursday afternoon storm update.

Lewiston city officials announced late in the day Thursday that due to the weather conditions and the expansive power outages, City Hall and the Lewiston Public Library will open late, at 11 a.m., on Friday.

While the storm was an aggravation for many people in many ways on Thursday, some approached it with a sort of shrugging resign. It IS April after all and good weather will surely be here soon. The forecast even calls for temperatures up in the high 50s come next week.

“In four days,” said Jerry Blais of Lewiston, “we will have forgotten it snowed.”