Maine Emergency Management Agency gives an update on Hurricane Lee

AUGUSTA, Maine (WABI) - The Maine Emergency Management Agency gave an update on the storm at a briefing in Augusta this afternoon.

MEMA Director Pete Rogers was joined by representatives from CMP and Versant Power.

Rogers says the biggest change since this morning is the path of the storm.

He says the track took a turn east and is projected to head up through the Bay of Fundy.

With thousands of power outages across the state, Rogers says restoration services are on hold in many areas for the safety of the personnel.

Both CMP and Versant says they’re doing all they can to assess damage and restore power safely.

“There are still impacts going on now certainly Eastern Maine is experiencing heavy winds, surf, downed wires, outages. As you pull further to the west they’re still also experiencing heavy winds, surf. I saw some footage this morning, a bit ago.. and it is still absolutely pounding down there and the wind is still blowing,” Rogers said.

“Our policy with our crews is 35 miles is the max wind speed before we can put up a bucket up so we have had to wait in some areas before we could put those crews to work to restore power. But right now, we’re making every effort to get power back on because we understand there are consequences beyond just sitting in the dark. There are economic consequences, there are costs associated with that, so we are going to do everything we can to get our customers back online, as quickly as possible,” Jon Breed with CMP said.

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