Maine power companies prep for Lee

Maine (WABI) - Maine’s major power providers tell TV5 they’re doing as much work, in advance, as they can to ensure the lights stay on through the weekend.

Officials from both Versant Power and Central Maine Power say they have their full arsenal of crews ready to respond to outages and have out of state help at the ready should the need arise.

Strong winds and the wet weather leading up to Hurricane Lee hitting Maine are creating a wild card in the form of potential downed trees on wires.

“We’ve been talking a lot about the incredibly wet summer we had. I saw a stat that this was actually Maine’s seventh wettest summer on record. And as we are the most densely forested state in the nation, a lot of the tree roots are weakened or rotted. So, if we are seeing significant winds, we could the scale of the damage could be worsened based on the trees.” said Jon Breed, CMP Spokesperson.

“We do have a tree trimming program where we regularly maintain our trees, and the work we’ve done will help us for this storm, but we also know that there are trees outside of our right of way zone that we weren’t able to cut and maintain, and those trees could present a risk and cause outages in this storm,” said Marissa Minor, Lead Communications Specialist from Versant.

Both companies ask that if you have an outage, report it with a call or on their app.

Please do not approach crews as they are working in the field.

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