REGION — High winds knocked out power to thousands of Central Maine Power Company customers in the central Maine area Monday morning, March 29.

According to CMP’s website, Oxford county customers were hit hardest with 6,494 outages as of 11:30 a.m.

That represented roughly 16% of the power company’s 41,645 customers in that county.

In Franklin County, 1,932 electricity customers, or about 8% of the 23,599 total customers in that county, were still without power shortly before noon.

Least affected in the trio-county area was Androscoggin County, where 1,151 customers, or about 2% of that county’s 57,214 total customer base lost power.

The company responded to the outages by deploying its 200 internal line-workers who were aided by an additional 180 contracted line-workers and 218 tree workers, according to a CMP spokeswoman.

“We are responding as quickly as we can with an emphasis on safety in the face of some very strong winds today,” said Kerri Theriault, CMP’s director of electric operations.

“We understand how frustrating it is to be without power, especially when customers are seeing blue skies outside their window. Safety is our top priority and we are not able to send our line-workers up in buckets when winds are dangerously high, like what we are seeing today. We will continue to make progress wherever and whenever we can, as quickly as possible,” Kerri said in a media statement.

As of noon Monday, CMP was reporting about 31,000 outages company-wide, according to the statement.

With winds forecasted to persist into Monday evening, it was likely that outages would continue to occur even while CMP made progress on restoration efforts.

CMP worked closely with local and county Emergency Management officials to ensure roads were cleared of any downed wires and/or debris and to understand local restoration priorities.