LEWISTON — A piece of broken equipment at the Hotel Road substation along a transmission line knocked out power to 16,000 Central Maine Power customers for about a half hour Monday morning.

Spokeswoman Gail Rice said she hoped power would be restored by 10 a.m. but it came on in Lewiston about 9:45 a.m.

Roughly 10,000 of the affected customers were in Androscoggin County with another 6,000 in Oxford County.

She described the broken piece of equipment as a “lightning arrester.”

“It’s a piece of protective equipment that we have on our system that can protect when lightning strikes, but sometimes these things fail and it causes an outage,” Rice said.

Central Maine Power trucks drive on Canal Street on Monday morning. (Larry Gilbert/Sun Journal)