Tuesday night’s powerful rain storms in central Maine downed several trees and power lines and damaged at least one Fairfield home, according to emergency management officials.
Michael Smith, Somerset County’s emergency management director, said his agency had reports of 17 trees and wires down, mostly in Fairfield. He said the dispatch center was busy Tuesday evening but the storm wasn’t overwhelming.
Rain began falling in central Maine Tuesday afternoon and was heavy in some spots throughout the night, producing frequent lightning strikes and thunder.
“We didn’t have a whole lot, and it was spread out and not in one particular area,” Smith said. “We had nothing that lasted an extended period of time.”
Fairfield’s public works director, Bruce Williams, said the town has been cleaning about a dozen trees, a couple of which brushed against houses. Luckily, he said, the problems were isolated to a three or four-block area, and the storm was better than expected.
“A porch was damaged by a limb that probably flew about 40 feet from the tree before it made contact,” Williams said.
Kennebec County’s emergency management office didn’t have reports of any damage around the area and there wasn’t any flooding.
Nearly 11,000 Central Maine Power customers lost power at some point during the storms, spokeswoman Gail Rice said. The peak of the outage was around 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.
In Kennebec County, Rice said, the peak period around 8 a.m. Wednesday had 690 reported outages. She said it was likely due to the need to temporarily disrupt service to a circuit to safely complete repairs. An estimated 1,500 homes were affected at some point during the storms.
In Somerset County, nearly 38 homes were affected at some time during the storms, and the peak time was 2:30 a.m. Wednesday when 29 homes were without power.
The National Weather Service in Gray said a flash flood watch remained in effect for portions of the state, including Kennebec and southern and central Somerset counties. Bands of showers and thunderstorms were expected to move into the area and remain through Wednesday night.
Jason Pafundi — 621-5663
Twitter: @jasonpafundiKJ
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