Slipping, sliding, crash. While hardy Mainers produce that stiff upper lip when talking to flatlanders about the massive ”“ and seemingly never-ending ”“ snowfall over the past week, vehicle crashes are nothing to joke about.
And there were plenty of them Monday, statewide, including some notable ones along the Maine Turnpike and I-95. Public safety officials said in some cases, people were driving too fast for road conditions.
There were crashes reported from York to Etna, which is about 20 miles southwest of Bangor, and undoubtedly some that didn’t make news reports.
It started in York Monday morning, when, according to Maine Public Safety spokesman Steve McCausland, a tractor trailer, whose driver was traveling too fast for the road conditions, rear-ended two cars following a snow plow.
McCausland said one car was pushed into the right shoulder of the road and the other was spun around. A passenger in one of the cars was slightly injured. The tractor trailer jack-knifed and ended up on the guardrails and median snowbank, and blocked two of the three northbound lanes, McCausland said in a prepared statement.
The truck driver was Theodore Banks, 74, of Virginia. The drivers of the two cars were Thomas Kwok of South Portland and Samuel Farmer from Ormond Beach, Florida. It was unclear which of the two men was injured.
It didn’t get any better as the morning wore on. There were a number of slide-offs, including an all-wheel-drive SUV that went off the turnpike in Arundel and ended up on a snow bank in the median. The driver was not inujured.
Later in the day, on I-95 in Etna, McCausland said a tractor trailer driven by Rodney P. Rioux, 66, of New Canada, was traveling northbound when he attempted to overtake a state plow truck driven by Alfred Washburn, 51, of Hartland. The tractor trailer struck the Department of Transportation plow truck, causing it to spin out of control, go off the road and roll onto its side. The tractor trailer went off into the median and struck the ledge. McCausland said neither driver was injured.
The two vehicles were to be removed sometime today.
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