Mike Mullins of Richardson and Sons from Geneva, New York fills the bed of a truck with linework equipment in the parking lot of the Saranac Waterfront Lodge ahead of a storm on Wednesday night. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

Electric crews are preparing for a late-season nor’easter to hit the Adirondacks, with a mix of wind, precipitation and freezing temperatures expected to bring heavy, wet snow and the potential for ice from now through Friday morning.

Meteorologist Rebecca Duell from the National Weather Service’s station in Burlington, Vermont said the highest wind gusts in our area are expected at 40 to 45 miles per hour, “nothing exceptional,” she said, and what is expected for a nor’easter.

National Grid Strategic Communications Manager Jared Paventi said these winds, along with heavy snow and ice, will likely be strong enough to strain trees that have already been battered and weakened this winter, making them more likely to break and take power lines down with them.

Lake Placid Electric Superintendent Kimball Daby said the village is “bracing for impact.”

Paventi said National Grid is pre-positioning crews in areas where they’re expecting greatest impacts, including the Tri-Lakes. Trucks were seen at local hotels on Wednesday afternoon. Paventi said these crews will work a bit from 6 p.m. to midnight, when most of them will rest and wait for the storm to blow over. When the roads and wilderness are safe to work in again, he said they’ll pick up the pieces from the overnight storm and get back at it again at 6 a.m. Thursday.

The heaviest portions of the storm are expected to hit east of the Adirondacks, with the eastern slopes of Adirondacks shadowing the western slopes, Duell said.

Duell said there is a big upper-atmosphere low pressure system over the Atlantic coast around Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which is combining with a local surface low pressure to bring in wind and precipitation from the coast.

“That’s what’s going to keep this storm in place so long,” Duell said. “Because this upper low is closed off over the area — usually a low would zip along a little bit faster — but because we have the upper low and the surface low together, it’s just sort of going to meander around.”

The NWS has a wind advisory in effect which ends at 10 a.m. Thursday.

Once the precipitation picks up overnight, Duell said, the wind should die down. Most of the wind will be in the east, up in the High Peaks and in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

“In terms of precipitation types, right now we’re seeing everything and the kitchen sink,” Duell said.

They are seeing a mixture of snow, rain, sleet and brief freezing rain, with the wet to turn to snow after midnight.

This area is supposed to get mostly sleet and snow overnight, which Duell said will result in less ice creation than other forms of precipitation.

Duell said most ice accumulation will be on the mountaintops. Snow accumulation of more than 15 inches is predicted for mountains above 2,500 feet in elevation. Down below, in town, around 6 inches is predicted, she said.

“We just have all of the trucks on the ready and prepared and we’ll wait and see what we get,” Daby said.

He said the direction of the wind is concerning, as it’s out of the east. Typically, more outages happen in the village when the wind’s out of the east. There have been some other outages earlier this winter, he said, but nothing the village couldn’t handle.

“People should always be prepared,” he said.

Essex County Emergency Services Director Matthew Watts said that he thinks the county will be “fine” during the predicted snowstorm.

“This happens all the time for us,” he said.

The county has put on extra 911 dispatchers to handle an increased call volume, which Watts said will likely consist of extra calls for utility services, thanks to predicted high winds. Extra utility crews are on call, as well. Other than that, it’s business as usual for the county, Watts said.

“We’re monitoring. We get daily briefings from the National Weather Service twice a day, and we push that out to all the town supervisors and public works and all of that,” he said.

National Grid is bringing field and tree crews to New York from as far away as Indiana, Ontario and Quebec.

On Wednesday afternoon, a National Grid outage map showed around 16,000 customers in the Syracuse area without power. The track of the storm and resulting outages is expected to move northeast Paventi said.

“We hope for the best but expect the worst,” Paventi said.

National Grid customers can text “REG” to 64743 can have personalized alerts sent to them via text, email or phone call. Customers also can text “OUT” to 64743 to report an outage. Notifying National Grid of outages can expedite restoration, according to the company.