A Massachusetts man’s foot accidentally slipped onto his gas pedal, which sent his truck into a garbage hopper at the Belgrade transfer station on Saturday, police say.
The landfill closed three hours early on Saturday after the crash, which was reported around noon and didn’t injure 75-year-old David Shea, of Marblehead, Massachusetts, and caused only “minor damage” to the hopper, said Sgt. Galen Estes of the Kennebec County Sheriff’s Office. He said that Shea’s foot slipped from the brake pedal onto the gas, and there will be no charges in the accident.
Estes said that transfer station employees shut off the hopper and helped Shea out of his 1999 Ford F150, and that a crane was brought into the landfill to take the vehicle, which sustained “significant damage,” out of the hopper.
The station is normally open on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday and it’s busy in the summer months. Before 3 p.m. on Saturday, a worker turned away residents and summer visitors with cars and trucks loaded with garbage and recyclables. At the station on Saturday, station manager Ken Scheno said he didn’t want to comment on the incident, but he said that the station would be open on Tuesday.
The garbage hopper is a ground-level stainless steel pit, about 10 feet deep with sides that slant inward to a hole in the bottom. Garbage thrown into the hopper slides down the sides into the hole, where a block of steel pushes the garbage into a dumpster behind the hopper.
It’s surrounded by a wall about 3 feet high on the outside, where residents pull up and toss garbage in, but one side is open, barred by a chain, a bar and a curb a few inches high, where pickup and garbage trucks back in to dump larger loads.
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.