LEWISTON — About 6,500 Central Maine Power customers lost power Thursday morning but by evening, that number was down to just a handful.

The bulk of the outages during the day were in Oxford County where CMP reported 2,037 customers without power. In Waterford 512 homes were without electricity and 335 customers in Greenwood were without power.

Franklin County had 738 outages, followed by Kennebec with 692, Piscatiquis with 596, Cumberland with 513 and Androscoggin with 264.

According to CMP, all but 500 customers had their lights back on by 9 p.m. Most of those remaining outages were in Oxford County.

Heavy winds Wednesday night and Thursday morning brought down trees around the region causing most of the outages.

High winds also kept the state’s open ski resorts from operating their higher-elevation chairlifts. According to a tweet posted by Sugarloaf in Carrabassett Valley the resort recived 5 to 7 inches of natural snow overnight and dropping temperatures allowed their snow-making crews to work but high winds were keeping their SuperQuad lift on hold.

” . . . winds are howling this a.m. Quad on wind hold for now,” the tweet read in part.

The weather observatory on the top of New England’s highest mountain, Mount Washington in New Hampshire was reporting wind speeds in excess of 80 mph at about 11:15 a.m.