Snow slows Maine power work

GARDINER, Maine - Snow fell Thursday in places still hustling to get power back on after a weekend ice storm that turned out the lights from Michigan to Maine and into Canada.

Eastern Maine and parts of the state's interior that have been without electricity since Sunday anticipated 3 to 7 inches of snow by the time the latest system pushed off the coast Thursday night. Utilities worried that the additional weight on branches and transmission lines could cause setbacks in the around-the-clock efforts to restore power.

"We don't think it's going to help us much, that's for sure," said Susan Faloon, a spokeswoman for Bangor Hydro Electric in Maine. "There was some concern expressed over the last couple of days about that storm coming because obviously we still have lot of stuff weighing down trees and lines.

"The system is pretty compromised out there," she said. "We expect we will have more outages."

In Michigan, where about half a million homes and businesses lost power at the peak of the weekend storm, an inch or so of snow was expected. Utilities there reported 101,000 customers without power Thursday morning and said it could be Saturday before all electricity is restored.

Maine reported more than 21,000 customers still out, down from a high of more than 106,000. There were more than 101,000 without power in three Canadian provinces - Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick - including 54,000 in Toronto.

In hard-hit Kennebec County, Maine, where the state capital of Augusta is located, glistening trees sagged under the weight of ice. Many tree limbs had snapped, littering yards.

On one road, workers in four bucket trucks from Massachusetts' N-Star utility company worked patiently to get a power line lifted back into place as snow fell sporadically. Paul Graham, the crew supervisor from Waltham, Mass., and a veteran of the devastating ice storm of 1998, said it could have been worse, even as his team worked its third consecutive 18-hour shift.

"Honestly, you got lucky," he said. "If it was a little more ice, poles would have been broken. Things would be on the ground. That's my take. If there was another quarter of an inch or a half-inch of ice, people would've been out for a long, long, long time.

"But I'm sure no one is thinking they're lucky, right?"

A state ferry was commandeered to transport utility crews to restore power to the 600 or so residents on the island of Islesboro.

Most utility customers in Maine were expected to have their lights on by week's end, but in some pockets damage was so severe it could take until Wednesday.

In the snow country of New York's Tug Hill Plateau, east of Lake Ontario, 11 to 17 inches of wind-whipped lake effect snow was expected to fall by the end of the day Friday. The ice storm knocked out electricity for about 50,000 customers in northern New York; all but about 150 had power back by Thursday.