A ride home from church Sunday turned into a frightening ordeal for a West Gardiner family trapped inside their vehicle for nearly two hours.
Jeremy and Sarah Cotnoir and their two young daughters were trapped inside their Chevrolet Suburban by live electrical wires that fell after slush sent their sport utility vehicle skidding off Maple Street in Farmingdale.
Videos
Additional Images
“We were scared at first, but the firefighters came soon after it happened and they calmed us down,” said Sarah Cotnoir. “We could see they were calm so we were calm.”
Keeping calm amid the mayhem was the task of the day Sunday as first responders and utility crews bounced from a steady stream of crashes and downed wires caused by an inaugural snowstorm that created near blizzard conditions for much of the day.
“It will be one for the memory books when it comes to an early season snowstorm,” said meteorologist John Cannon of the National Weather Service.
The storm certainly proved memorable for the Cotnoirs, who were driving on Maple Street around 12:45 p.m. on their way home to West Gardiner. Sarah Cotnoir said her husband, who was driving, could feel the slush that blanketed the road pull their SUV off to the right.
“My husband did his best to not hit the telephone pole and not hit the trees,” Sarah Cotnoir said. “We went right in between.”
The Suburban did, however, hit the guy wire attached to the pole, which caused the top to topple off. The pole, along with the lines and transformer attached to it, landed beside the SUV with the top leaning on the vehicle.
“All we saw was sparks,” Sarah Cotnoir said. “We had to stay in the vehicle until they could come and kill the live wire.”
Jeremy Cotnoir at first shut off the SUV’s engine, leaving the family without heat, until he was assured it was safe to turn it back on. The family was trapped for nearly two hours.
“We tried to sit very still,” Sarah Cotnoir said. “I think we were a little bit in shock. There was not a lot of movement.”
Central Maine Power crews, who were responding to thousands of outages throughout the region, arrived later to turn off the power to the line, allowing the family to get out of the SUV. They waited in a firefighters truck for warmth until a tow truck was able to pull their Suburban back onto the road. Sarah Cotnoir said the front bumper was dislodged during the ordeal, but she expected they would drive the SUV home.
She said the roads were deceiving at the time of the crash.
“They barely looked wet,” she said. “At that point we thought we would make it home just fine. After three hours there was a lot more accumulation.”
The Cotnoirs were not the only drivers to struggle with the quickly falling, wet snow. Dozens of crashes were reported across Central Maine throughout the day as drivers struggled to navigate deep slush that covered roads across the region. None of the crashes was believed to have caused serious injury.
Communities in Lincoln, Knox and Waldo counties, where crashes occurred at a regular pace Sunday morning, bore the brunt of the storm early on. Kennebec County communities soon joined in the misery as snow that started falling around 8 a.m. began piling up a couple of hours later.
Cars and trucks started slipping and sliding off the roads of northern Kennebec and Somerset counties just before noon Sunday. Accidents were reported in Canaan and on Bog Road in Vassalboro, and a crash involving injury was reported on Warren Hill Road in Palmyra.
Augusta Police, after a relatively quiet early morning, responded to numerous calls later on, including a multi-vehicle crash on Route 3 near North Country Harley Davidson that forced closure of the route for about 30 minutes.
In the Waterville-Skowhegan area and across Somerset County, reports of cars off the road and in ditches started coming in to dispatchers at about 11:30 a.m. Sunday. There were people taken to the hospital in crashes on Warren Hill and Madawaska roads in Palmyra, with several cars off the road from Ripley to Rome and everywhere in between. Trees and wires were reportedly down in Waterville, Skowhegan, Cornville, St. Albans and several other towns.
Several drivers lost control of their vehicles on Route 3 in China. In Winslow, a two-car accident involving injury was reported east of Pattee’s Pond Road on China Road, and traffic was reportedly having trouble getting up the hill, initially blocking rescue crews.
A dispatcher for Maine State Police said the roads were very slippery with numerous vehicles off the road along Interstate 95 Sunday afternoon.
In Somerset County, two additional sheriff’s deputies were called into work early to handle the volume of accident calls.
“It’s been bad all day all over the county,” the Somerset dispatcher said. None of the accidents appeared to have resulted in serious injuries, he said.
Utility crews, meanwhile, were dealing with numerous lines brought down by limbs that could no longer bear the strain of the wet, heavy snow and winds that gusted in excess of 40 mph. Trees and wires were reported down across Kennnebec County and in Embden and Anson in Somerset County as the snow picked up and the wind increased.
Central Maine Power reported more than 79,000 customers without power Sunday night. The number of outages increased by about 30,000 in about 90 minutes time.
“We’ve been watching this storm all week,” said CMP spokeswoman Gail Rice.
Most of the outages were reported in Lincoln (16,600), Knox (19,000) and Waldo (17,700) counties. In Kennebec County, 6,400 CMP customers were without power Sunday night, and there were just over 1,000 darkened customers in Somerset County. Franklin County had a little over 3,000 without power.
“We’re experiencing quite a few outages today,” Rice said. “The numbers are still going up.”
Rice said as many crews as possible were being diverted to the hardest hit areas along the midcoast.
“Every available person is out there right now,” Rice said.
Terri Pelletier spent part of Sunday trying to hire an electrician to repair a service box outside her home on Park Street in Farmingdale. The box was ripped from the house when a large hemlock tree fell across the service line that feeds power to the home. The disruption impacted at least 20 homes in the area.
“They’re hoping to send somebody up,” Pelletier said. “It might be a few more days before we have power.”
Pelletier, who shares the house with her husband and teenage daughter, said she came home from church to discover she had no power. They do not have a generator.
“I think my husband’s going after work today to get one,” Pelletier said.
Pelletier said conditions on the road, as at her house, changed quickly as the storm settled in.
“The roads are not good because the ground is soft,” she said. “They weren’t bad at 9 this morning, but they’re progressively getting worse.”
Cannon, the meteorologist, said the storm’s impact was greater than expected because bands of heavy snow became nearly stationary over the region. The bands dropped enough snow to accumulate rapidly despite the warm ground temperatures.
“We’ve always been right on the razor thin edge with this one,” Cannon said. “We’ve had near blizzard conditions for a good portion of the day.”
A winter storm warning in place for the capital district throughout the day was due to expire by 10 p.m., Sunday. About 8 inches of snow was expected to cover the area by the time it was over, but the midcoast, which saw even higher winds and a greater number of downed limbs, was hit even harder.
“By the time you get to the midcoast, you’re looking at 14 or 15 inches of snow,” Cannon said.
The region will wake up to sunny skies today with temperatures expected to climb into the mid-40s.
“There will be a fair number of people without power,” Cannon said.
The Weather Service is calling for temperatures in the 50s on Wednesday and Thursday before taking another nosedive heading into the weekend.
Though describing the storm as “memorable,” it was not a record setter for the amount of snow it dropped or for its early arrival. In 2011 a Halloween storm dropped more than a foot of snow across much of the southern section of the state. York and Oxford counties were hardest hit by that storm. Sunday’s storm, in contrast, saved the bulk of its punch for eastern and northern Maine.
“We’ve had them even earlier,” Cannon said.
Staff writer Doug Harlow contributed to this report.
Craig Crosby — 621-5642
Twitter: @CraigCrosby4
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have a commenting profile? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.