Storm knocks out power to more than 3,000 households in Orono and Old Town

OLD TOWN, Maine — More than 3,000 households in Orono and Old Town are without power due to a midday thunderstorm, Versant Power said. 

A tree apparently fell during the storm and broke two utility poles, causing the outage Tuesday afternoon.

Crews are working to isolate the outage to the area where the damage occurred and service should be restored to most customers fairly quickly, the company said. 

The area has seen multiple widespread outages in the past two weeks caused by damaged utility equipment. The first in a string of outages happened on Aug. 13 when a piece of road machinery hit a utility pole. 

Two separate car crashes caused more power outages in the area the following week. 

Versant Power said it is working to install protection equipment in the Old Town and Orono areas to limit the frequency of large outages in the future. 

Versant Power says it has a plan to limit magnitude of outages in Orono area

Information about the outage is available on Versant Power’s live outage map.