Ava Bean, 11, of Sabattus puts her neighbors’ mail back into their mailbox Wednesday after mailboxes belonging to her family and her neighbors were knocked off their posts by a snowplow. Bean had already carried her mailbox back to her house for her father, Zac Pomelou, to fix. “Happens frequently,” Pomelou said. Bean, a sixth-grader at Oak Hill Middle School, had her second consecutive snow day off from school Wednesday. (Sun Journal photo by Daryn Slover)

Nearly 3,000 households were in the dark across the region Wednesday night as heavy wet snow continued to fall into the late afternoon.

The bulk of the outages were in Oxford County where 2,500 Central Maine Power customers had lost power by early Wednesday night. That number had been up to 5,500 earlier in the day.

Roughly 1,000 were without power in Franklin County on Wednesday night while Androscoggin County was mostly spared, with only 30 reported to be in the dark by 8 p.m.

Power outages and car crashes were the order of the day as rain turned into freezing rain and snow by late afternoon. The result was slick, slushy roads and enough wet snow to bring down tree limbs and power lines in some areas.

Winter chaos came in other forms, too. Schools were canceled, some for the second straight day, and mailboxes were reported knocked over by passing plows.

There was no more snow in the immediate forecast, but the National Weather Service in Gray said cold and wind are on the way.