By Michael Shepherd - Sept. 18, 2023
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Hurricane Lee weakened around the time it hit here on Saturday, but the storm caused tens of thousands of outages centered on eastern Maine and killed a Winterport father when a tree hit his vehicle on the way to the gym.

That was the most harrowing story from this weekend. A top Maine lawmaker had another one, with a police chief saying House Minority Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham, R-Winter Harbor, was "lucky to be alive" after he and his sternman had to cling to their lobster boat when waves rolled in Friday. 

We're also getting an early look at the performance of Maine's large electric utilities. Here's what you need to know about Lee's impact.

Faulkingham called his survival a case of divine intervention. The top Republican took to Facebook and appeared on WVOM to tell his survival tale. After he finished hauling lobster traps for the day, Faulkingham said he saw a "wall of water" coming toward the boat. It effectively flipped the vessel on top of he and his sternman, throwing them into the water.

Without swallowing any seawater, Faulkingham said he was able to get back to the overturned 42-foot boat and pull his sternman up. About an hour later, they were rescued and the boat went down minutes later. The local police chief said the two were "very lucky to be alive."

"How did she stay afloat that long for no apparent reason and moments after we were safe go down?" Faulkingham wrote on Facebook. "It was a series of miracles. God was with us."

Lee was weaker than many expected, but power restoration efforts went well amid high stakes. As I said before the storm, a lot was riding on it for Central Maine Power Co. and Versant Power, the utilities that are being targeted for a takeover as part of Question 3 on the November ballot.

While they may have been a little bit lucky because Lee turned slightly to the east, the utilities looked to perform well. Outages peaked at above 100,000. By Monday, only about 2,100 people were still without power between the CMP and Versant coverage areas. A majority of them were along the coast between Eastport and Stonington, the spot in Maine that was hit hardest by Lee.

"Internal, contract, and tree crews are out working today to continue repairs safely and as quickly as possible," Versant said in an 11 a.m. update on the efforts.

Both utilities staged hundreds of crews before the storm here, and those moves look to have paid off in the short term. Our Power, the political group running the campaign for Question 3, has often cited outage events to ding the incumbent utilities, but it had not made hay of the Lee response by Monday.

Election Day is coming quickly. One thing to watch in the months after that will be the response from Public Advocate William Harwood, whose office recently accused CMP of effectively overpreparing for 2022 storms in an effort to get the state to withhold $53 million in ratepayer funding from the utility.

CMP shot back sharply at that assertion, and Harwood said Monday that he didn't have enough data yet to judge the utilities' response to Lee.

"All I can say is [I] appreciate the hard work that they put into getting people's power back as soon as possible," he said.