Update: Power had been restored to Old Town by early Friday afternoon.
Nearly a thousand residents in Old Town and the city’s high school are without power due to an outage that Versant Power is investigating, the utility said Friday.
The utility said shortly after noon Friday that nearly 1,200 Penobscot County residents are without power.
Old Town High School’s phone lines are down as a result but classes are continuing, the school said on Facebook.
Versant has been working in recent months on a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project to upgrade the power infrastructure in the Old Town-Orono area. In August, Versant Power officials said the company is committed to improving service in the area after an “unacceptable” number of outages since 2020.
There have been at least 15 service interruptions to the area since 2020, with customers experiencing on average two to three sustained transmission line outages a year, according to the company.