Seventy-year-old Norma Richard stood looking in disbelief early Saturday evening at the damage in front of her Hancock Street apartment in Rumford.

An approximately 100-year-old maple tree, uprooted by Friday night’s severe wind and rain storm, had toppled into the 100-year-old brick building that housed Richard and three other families. It also shattered a utility pole and felled several wires, including a power line that draped over a car, whose owner was not allowed to move, Richard said.

“It was really scary,” Richard said, describing the 10:30 p.m. incident and the winds, which according to Central Maine Power, left 18,500 customers without power before noon Saturday.

“I was laying on my bed, and I heard a loud boom! I felt the vibration after it went over. It was really loud, but I thought it was out back,” she said, seeing the damage for the first time Saturday.

Winds of near 50 miles per hour and at least 2 inches of rain whipped and pelted the area for several hours Friday night. According to the National Weather Service in Gray, wind speeds of 54 miles per hour in recorded in Turner were the second-highest in the state. The highest wind speed recorded during the storm was 56 miles per hour at Mount Desert Rock.

According to CMP, outages had been reduced to 9,584 by 4 p.m. Saturday. Crews don’t expect to complete the job until midday today or early this evening in the Bridgton, Farmington and Lewiston areas.

As of Saturday evening, several thousand customers in the state were still with out power.

During the peak of the storm Friday, a 105-mph gust at about 10 p.m. blew at least one weather service intern off his feet atop the Mount Washington Observatory, which recorded a peak gust of 129 mph overnight.

Rumford firefighters and Waldo Street resident Les Frost, said they were dealing with their own unbelievable wind.

“It was like mini-tornadoes. There was times we had trouble standing. I was up for 25 hours straight yesterday, dealing with power lines down, trees on wires, and just everything,” Rumford fire Lt. Rob Dixon said.

Frost, who took his family out to see the Hancock Street tree that attracted several onlookers throughout the day, said he couldn’t even make headway in the wind.

“That wind was wild! It blew me right down the road backwards! I wasn’t expecting that,” Frost said.

“It feels like every telephone pole in the county fell down,” 16-year Oxford County Regional Communication Center dispatcher Steve Cordwell in Paris said Saturday.

“Trees on wires was 85 percent of the stuff we had today. Lots of power outages but very little river flooding. They were worried about the covered bridge in Andover for a while though,” he said of the Ellis River.

They were deluged with more than 100 calls about outages from just about every town in the county. Likewise, said a Franklin County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher in Farmington.

“People were not happy. They hadn’t had power since 9 p.m.,” he said.

Lewiston and Auburn were dealing with similar conditions; calls of trees, power lines and poles down and even on fire, flooded in to police from midevening to early morning.

Total rainfall from the storm averaged between 1 to 3 inches. Temple, with 1.78 inches, was the highest in the area, according to the Weather Service.

Meanwhile, residents of the Hancock Street apartment house, who were evacuated from the building Friday night, were not allowed back Saturday night.

The building is owned by Peru selectman Andy St. Pierre, and his wife, Annette. Rumford police said Saturday night that St. Pierre had found someone to take down the tree. But, before that can be done, he said Verizon had to remove phone lines entangled in the tree.

“It doesn’t look like there’s any structural damage, and, hopefully, there’s no water damage,” Andy St. Pierre said, contacted by phone at his home.