Power outage affects area residents, businesses
By Scott Mitchell Johnson
Staff Writer
MAPLETON — Nearly 3,000 Maine Public Service customers were without power Monday night.
According to Virginia R. Joles, senior communications specialist for Maine Public Service, a broken tree is being blamed for the power interruption.
“A large tree broke at the trunk and the top was blown onto a transmission line west of Mapleton,” she said. “MPS customers in Mapleton, Scopan Lake, Ashland and sections of Presque Isle were without power from 8:54-9:30 p.m.
“The outage affected approximately 2,987 customer accounts,” said Joles.
One of the sections in Presque Isle that was affected was north Main Street. Several businesses were without power and closed early, while others waited for power to be restored.
“We were down for a while, but we have backups for our lighting, so it wasn’t anything major,” said Chad Gray, store manager of Walmart. “Our registers were down so customers had to stand and wait. I think we had four shopping carts abandoned, so it wasn’t too bad.
[If it had to happen], it was just about at the best time of day for us because it gets pretty quiet in here,” he said, noting that the store is open until midnight. “Fortunately we were only without power for about a half-hour. It could have been worse; anything over two hours becomes a concern with refrigeration.”
Laura Buckley, server/closer at the Irish Setter Pub in Presque Isle, said about 40 customers were still inside when the lights went out.
“We’re open until 9 p.m., but we still had a pretty good amount of people in the pub,” she said. “A lot of people ended up leaving, and we had everybody go outside to our deck which was kind of cool that we had that as an option for them. We have LED lighting on the outside tables so they had a little light to see by. They seemed happy to be outside as they finished up their food and drinks, but we weren’t able to cash anybody out because all of our systems were down.
“We did have some food that we had to throw away because some of our guests had to leave, so it was kind of an inconvenience that way, but Maine Public Service was so quick to respond and were able to get everything back up and going,” said Buckley. “They did a great job and kept our losses to a minimum; it could have been so much worse.”
Since many customers hadn’t finished their order, they hadn’t paid before the power went off.
“In this day and age, people are so afraid of credit card fraud that they weren’t comfortable leaving their information, so we told them to come in the next day to pay,” said Buckley. “We’re very fortunate at the pub to have regulars, so we asked them to come in Tuesday and settle up and by lunchtime Tuesday they had come in and paid. There are still honest people in the world which is nice to see.”
Another section of transmission line fed from the Presque Isle Switching Station was isolated and put back in service within four minutes, according to Joles.
