Weather disrupts power
By Natalie Bazinet
Staff Writer
CARIBOU — Over 10,000 Maine Public Service customers lost power Friday night due to a powerful storm that seemed to down trees left and right; just over 9,500 customers lost power on Saturday after a second weather event blew through the county and darkened skies all the way from the Allagash to Houlton.
“The Caribou area seemed to be the centerline of the west-to-east path of the storms and received the brunt of the storm damage,” said Virginia Joles, director of public information with Maine Public Service.
According to Noelle Runyan, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Caribou, it appears that a strong storm just to the northwest of Caribou produced a macro burst of strong winds that reached 70 to 90 miles an hour — maybe even higher — as they pushed southeast across the town between 7:30 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. It’s likely that damage occurred north of the city prior to those times and additional damage occurred south of Caribou as the storm progressed.
“Another hard-hit area was Ashland,” Runyan said. In Ashland, the storm produced similarly strong winds as well, likely in the 70 to 90 miles per hour range.
Sporadic tree damage was reported in other parts of the county as well.
“We had pretty wet ground and often times, tree damage occurs at lower windspeeds when the ground is saturated,” Runyan explained.
High winds and resultantly, the trees those winds knocked down, left many MPS customers in the dark over the weekend.
Communities impacted the most through Friday’s outages were Ashland, Caribou, Fort Fairfield, New Sweden and Stockholm; Caribou, Fort Fairfield, Limestone, Easton, Presque Isle and New Sweden experienced the most outages during Saturday’s weather event.
Friday’s outages left customers without power on average approximately 3 hours and 52 minutes; customers were in the dark on average 2 hours and 12 minutes on Saturday.
“We had some outages as short as 15 minutes,” explained Joles. “Some customers who had damage to their electrical entrances and needed to hire an electrician were without power as long as three days.”
A total of 1,285 phone-in troubletickets were created during the storms, a number that includes customers calling multiple times and informative reports of locations where downed trees were spotted on the power lines.
Flash flooding was reported in some areas as the storms were both quick-moving, but not too much precipitation was recorded during the weather event.
On Friday, Caribou received .93 inches of rain and only .53 inches on Saturday, but the rain fell relatively quickly.
Officials with the National Weather Service have not yet confirmed a water spout — which is a tornado over the water — that is speculated to have occurred on Long Lake during Saturday’s storm, but according to Runyan “it’s not out of the question that one could have occurred.”
