Crystal Curtis’ son, Izaiah, 9, is on the autism spectrum and doesn’t respond well to change. But there has been a lot of change and even more unknowns since Sunday, when a fall snowstorm left thousands of Mainers without power. It meant tears, a few angry outbursts and a lot of questions from Izaiah and younger brother, Joziah, 4. But the boys finally had some resolution midday Tuesday, when power was restored to the Capehart neighborhood where they live.
As of Tuesday morning, about 400 households in the Capehart neighborhood of Bangor, where about 800 school-age children and 100 infants live, were still in the dark, their third day without power. Support agencies and the school district had contingency plans in place to help families prepare meals, stay warm overnight and make up lost classroom time.
Bangor Housing Authority staff at the front desk of the Davis Road office were using cellphones Tuesday morning because the phone system was down and cheered any time an Emera truck drove by, hopeful the crew was on their way to make repairs. Down the hall in the community center, Executive Director Mike Myatt bounced a baby on his hip and chatted with residents who were passing the time reading books, drinking coffee and talking about how cold it was the night before.
“We’re basically trying to stay out of the house as much as possible,” Karen Nicholson, mother of two, said Tuesday morning. “I had eight blankets on last night, and I still woke up freezing. It has to be below 50 [degrees] in the house.”
Nicholson and her children don’t have a vehicle, so they walked to the community center first thing. They planned on staying the night Tuesday after Bangor Housing announced it would keep the space open and staffed all night. However, the center later announced via social media that, since power returned, it would not stay open. For families like the Nicholsons, that means the comforts of home again.
During the outage, the housing authority building was running on a generator that was installed a few years ago in anticipation of weather events similar to the fall storm Sunday. The center doesn’t have cots or accommodations for anyone staying, but Myatt said residents were welcome to use the kitchen to cook and to eat the limited snacks staff members scrounged up.
“This isn’t anything we’ve ever done before and it’s not overly comfortable, but it’s better than nothing,” he said glancing around the gym. The cold, orange-and-tan floor was littered with childrens’ toys.
Many families visiting the center during the past couple of days were using outlets to plug in anything from cellphones to medical devices. Nicholson and Curtis brought nebulizers for their children, who are prone to bronchial spasms in the cold, and Nicholson’s 4-month-old daughter was fighting a cough.
The outages also meant Downeast School and Bangor Regional Therapeutic Day Program were closed Monday and Tuesday, a first for the Bangor School Department, which typically doesn’t need to close just one or two schools at a time for weather. All other schools in the district resumed classes Tuesday.
Superintendent Betsy Webb said because of the closure of Downeast and Bangor Regional Therapeutic Day Program, she would need to work with the Maine Department of Education to address the lost classroom hours for those schools. Students district-wide end typically classes on the same day in June. But that may be different this year for the two schools, which won’t reopen until Wednesday.
“A lot of things are still up in the air, so we’re taking it one day at a time,” Webb said.
