A pine tree completely blocks access to a home in April on Garfield Road in Auburn. Widespread damage occurred to trees and power lines in the area during a snowstorm. Andree Kehn/Sun Journal

Despite its short stay, Tuesday night’s thunderstorm brought in gusts of high-speed winds and heavy rain to the Brunswick area.

The weather downed trees, knocking out power to thousands of residents and businesses and leaving them in a familiar dark seen a handful of times already this year. The severe weather and its impact on Maine infrastructure are prompting many to once again point the finger at one looming culprit.

“What we’re seeing is the impact of climate change,” said Central Maine Power spokesperson Jonathan Breed on the frequency of severe storms in recent years. “We’re working to deal with the impacts of this.”

CMP, a major energy provider, is typically the first responder to downed trees across Maine and works closely with local emergency management agencies to mitigate outages in severe weather. Its first priority, Breed said, is to restore power to customers, but the changing nature of storms in the past few years are posing a unique challenges to the grid.

“Not only are these storms a little warmer,” he said, “but the directions of the winds are changing.”

With more winds coming from the south and hitting vulnerable points of trees typically resilient towards northeast winds, Breed said, more trees are coming down and taking power lines with them.

Sean Birkel, a Maine state climatologist and contributing author to Maine Climate Office’s recent climate update, said that possible changes in wind direction are currently complex to diagnose.

“If trees and their root systems have become more adapted to wintertime nor’easter events — but now were seeing ‘southeaster’ events — if that becomes a trend, then that could be a factor in increased tree damage,” Birkel said. In order to establish a trend, he said, more data needs to be analyzed.

Birkel said that there are many factors to consider with increased storm damage seen in the recent years. For one, the December and January storms had three major southeasterly wind events, which he said was unusual for that time of year.

In these winter storms, he said, infrastructure and trees were weakened with each passing of severe weather. Birkel also said that heavy and erosive rainfalls combined with strong winds can contribute to trees being more likely to fall.

“Overall, we are seeing more extremes,” he said. “We are seeing an increase in the average number of heavy precipitation events in a given year, and climate models project that heavy precipitation events will continue to become more impactful.”

Resilient grid needed to combat climate change effects

Last December, CMP published its Climate Change Protection Plan, which identified several risks to the company’s grid, such as long-term changes in temperatures, severe storms and heatwaves.

The company’s transformers, for instance, are designed for a daily temperature maximum of 86 degrees. The long-term effects of climate change, however, make temperatures likely to exceed that threshold, according to the Protection Plan.

The company began adjusting infrastructure to be more resilient towards climate change back in 2019. The initiative included projects to minimize outages and monitor power lines.

This year’s efforts include July’s utility bill rate hike of about 1%, which will accommodate initiatives like grid resiliency in bad weather, which Breed described as “critical” to the Portland Press Herald. The costs of the storm damage that occurred over the past year alone attributed to the rate increase, Breed told The Times Record.

In light of Tuesday night’s storm, Breed said that it’s going to take local communities and advocacy groups coming together with the utility company to address modernizing infrastructure against the effects of climate change.

“There’s a lot of efforts underway to strengthen and modernize the grid,” Breed said, later adding, “We are eager to work with as many as we can to ensure we are on the path to handle these challenges.”