Gov. John Baldacci signed an emergency declaration this afternoon to allow power crews from other states to come in and help restore power to the 250,000 – 275,000 individuals in the state without power in today’s storm.

The declaration also waives federal rules to allow power crews to work longer hours, which should help speed up the job of restoring power to people affected by the outages.

The problem, said John Carroll, Central Maine Power spokesman, is that other northern New England states were struggling with their own outages, particularly New Hampshire.

Mainers continued to dig out from the spring storm that dumped up 18 inches of heavy wet snow over parts of the region, bent trees to the ground and knocked down power lines.

Carroll said many customers would be in the dark into Friday and the cleanup could continue for days.

Most of the power outages were concentrated in the areas in and around Brunswick, Alfred and Portland. At noon the tally of customers without power included: Alfred, 36,000, Farmington, 90, Lewiston, 1,690, Bridgton, 4,000 Portland 15,000, Brunswick, 30,000, Rockland, 2,200, Dover, 90, Skowhegan, 440 and Fairfield, 2,400.

To the north, the impact appeared far less severe. Bangor Hydro-Electric reported more than 4,000 outages.

The outages started at about 3 a.m. and but appeared to level off by noon. Still, said Carroll, it could be several days before power is restored everywhere.

He said in some cases restoration could be as simple as resetting the circuit on a line where power was interupted because of a drooping tree limb. But in other cases restoration could take longer if power poles were snapped. Crews were still assessing the damage in the early afternoon, a process that could continue into the evening, Carroll said.