Restoration Update from CMP President Joe Purington

 

Dear CMP Customer,

The first major snowstorm of this season has dumped a lot of heavy, wet snow across Maine, weighing down trees that are breaking and falling onto utility poles and into wires. In some cases, we are restoring power only to have another tree fall and cause another outage.

Our goal is to restore power to our customers as safely and quickly as possible. While we are actively restoring as soon as a storm hits, we are also assisting Emergency Management Officials in clearing downed wires and debris from local roads so that emergency vehicles can pass. Today, our restoration efforts are also challenged by treacherous roads, many impassable.  

It has been a real challenge to access some parts of the system. And, because we need to see and understand the extent of damage before we can estimate how long it will take to repair, we haven’t yet been able to provide estimated times for all customers for when repairs will be made, and power will be restored.  

Given the travel and access challenges, along with the extent of damage to the system, this will be a multiple day restoration effort and some customers may be out of power until late Monday evening or early Tuesday in some of the hardest hit, more remote areas of the State.  That being said, we do expect to make significant progress in our restoration efforts in the next 24-36 hours now that the storm has exited our service territory.

We had more than 1000 resources engaged in system repairs and restoration today and we expect nearly 600 more to join us tomorrow, including from our sister AVANGRID companies in New York and Connecticut.

I encourage you to sign up for outage alerts so we can send you an estimated restoration time as soon as one is available. You can also download our free mobile app, where you can see the status of your outage, including an estimated restoration time once provided. And the outage page of our website will also provide updates as we make them available.

CMP will be in the field 24/7 until the power is restored to every customer. Please stay safe in this weather and look out for your neighbors. We thank you for your patience.

Sincerely,

Joe Purington
President and CEO, CMP