HOULTON, Maine — Those who stayed up late Sunday watching Super Bowl festivities may have missed their wake-up call Monday morning after a dump truck knocked out power for many Houlton residents.
According to Houlton Police officer Rick York, a town-owned dump truck operated by John Tribou had just finished dumping snow in the Hillview Avenue lot at 7:48 a.m., but failed to lower the bucket before leaving. The bucket of the truck caught on some guy wires, causing a chain reaction in which two utility poles snapped.
Houlton Water Company President John Clark said damage to the poles was significant. Houlton Water Company has joint ownership of the utility poles with Fairpoint. Clark said his company planned to execute an emergency replacement procedure to get the poles replaced as quickly as possible.
“Those poles are pretty significant because they carry phone, cable television, Internet and electricity,” Clark said. “There are also transformers on them, so it’s a mess.”
Electricity was restored to the Pleasant Street area, including Houlton High School, fairly quickly. A longer outage ranging from the bottom of Drake’s Hill to Spring Street was to be expected, Clark said. He anticipated that area getting power back later Monday morning.
Power to County Yankee was out for most of the morning because of the incident. An empty RSU 29 school bus was also located in the grocery store parking lot, with wires strewn over it. York said the driver of the school bus was not harmed and was able to exit the vehicle once it was determined the wires were not dangerous.
“It’s not a good situation, but it could have been a lot worse,” Clark said.
No charges were expected.
