BANGOR, Maine — What began as two blown tires wound up becoming a two-day cleanup project involving a truck driver, a tow truck operator, a pulp truck operator, state police and state transportation officials, among others.
The trouble began about 4:30 p.m. Monday, when Marvin Lovely, a driver for Trailer Transport in Brewer, was delivering an old mobile home to a customer who wanted to use it for storage. As he traveled south on Interstate 95, the driver noticed that two of the tires on his rig blew as he neared the Interstate 395 overpass, state police Trooper Trevor Snow said Wednesday.
Lovely pulled over as far as he could onto the shoulder of the highway, but soon found that the shoulder was soft — so soft that the wheels on one side of the truck and trailer sank eight to 10 inches into the dirt, causing the rig to tilt.
Despite trying for several hours to change the tires, the driver concluded that the equipment he had on hand was not adequate, given the shoulder conditions, Snow said. At 9 p.m., he called a Carmel towing company in the hope the trailer could be towed to nearby Dysart’s Truck Stop.
Despite several more hours of work, that too proved impossible because the aging mobile home’s wooden infrastructure started sliding off its metal frame and two of the trailer’s axles broke off and got shoved up inside the mobile home, Snow said. Furthermore, he said, the tongue connecting the trailer to the truck broke.
“The more we tried to move it, the worse it got,” Snow said.
During those efforts, traffic periodically was stopped or slowed as the tow truck and other rescue vehicles maneuvered around the scene.
At about 1 a.m. Tuesday, a Maine Department of Transportation supervisor was called in to assess the situation. After some discussion, the group agreed that the safest way to remove the mobile home was to take it apart where it stood and remove it in pieces.
“We decided to push it over,” Snow said. The mobile home was knocked over into the grassy area beyond the breakdown lane to get it farther away from the roadway. Before starting to tear it down, the members of the group decided to get a little shut-eye and left the scene at about 3:30 a.m.
After grabbing a few hours of sleep, the driver, police, DOT workers and a logging contractor returned to the site at about 11 a.m. Tuesday to begin the cleanup operation, which involved collecting the pieces of broken mobile home with a self-loading pulp trailer, Snow said. The area was back to normal by 6:30 p.m., he said.
Despite the effort required and the hot, muggy weather, “they did a very good job. I’ve never been involved in anything like that and I don’t think I want to again,” Snow said.
Though he did not have dollar estimates Wednesday, the trooper said the cost of picking up the pieces and hauling them away likely far exceeded the $1,500 cost of the mobile home.