FORT KENT, Maine — High winds and blowing snow created headaches for drivers around the state Monday.
The winds, combined with the snow that fell over the weekend, created near whiteout conditions.
“We recorded a wind gust of 60 mph in Frenchville early this morning,” said Pete Rahe, observing program leader at the National Weather Service office in Caribou. “Winds are right around 40 and 50 mph all over the state this morning and causing a lot of blowing and drifting snow.”
Fred Getchell of Presque Isle got a firsthand look at the conditions as he drove to Easton around 8 a.m. Monday on Route 10.
“When I left my house the road was surrounded by other houses so it did not look that bad,” Getchell said Monday morning. “But when I got in the open, it was complete whiteouts [and] there was no safe way to stop or turn around, so I just had to keep trudging forward.”
Getchell said luckily the winds had cleared the snow from the sides of the road and he was able to see and follow the white line designating the breakdown lane, but at one point he got a scare when he almost hit a car traveling in front of him.
“It was a near miss,” he said. “We both just kept going and kind of eased along. Had I known it was that bad, I never would have ventured out.”
Winds were expected to drop to 15 to 20 mph overnight before quieting down Tuesday, Rahe said.
The good news, he said, is the state is done with snowstorms for now after some spots in far eastern and southern Maine recorded more than 2 feet of new snow over the weekend.
The bad news is the wind and low temperatures are creating extreme wind chills around the state and there is no sign of a warm-up anytime soon, Rahe said.
“Most areas are going to be at zero to 10 above through the midweek,” he said. “We are seeing wind chills as low as 35 below.”
Much of Maine from Portland up to the St. John Valley was under a wind chill warning Monday, with gale warnings posted from Machias down to Portland.
Things may warm up to the teens on Wednesday as a storm system moves up from the south. Rahe said that system could produce light snow Down East.
“That area may get a glancing blow,” he said. “Not that they need it [because] they are so buried in snow right now.”
Rahe said one of his observers in Robbinston recorded 105.4 inches of snow over the last 45 days.
“I don’t know if that’s an official record,” Rahe said. “But it’s a record for him.”
Though many of the accidents were relatively minor, whiteout conditions were a factor in a head-on collision in Hamlin on Monday morning that seriously injured a Van Buren couple, according to Maine State Police.
An accident on Houlton Road at the Westfield four-corners intersection temporarily shut down the southbound lane, according to information posted on the Presque Isle Police Department’s Facebook page. A dispatcher at the Houlton State Police barracks confirmed the accident Monday morning, but no other details were immediately available.
In southern Maine, the Maine Turnpike Authority posted on Twitter Monday morning that traffic was blocked briefly because of a crash at mile marker 93 in Litchfield.
Police in Washington County dealt with numerous accidents throughout the day, including one on Route 1 near Whitney Wreaths, according to a Washington County Communications Center dispatcher.
The dispatcher said Monday afternoon that state police and sheriff’s deputies had dealt with five accidents throughout the wind-swept county.
The crash near Whitney Wreaths, near the Machias-Whitneyville town line, shut down Route 1 for a short period of time but no serious injuries were reported.
While no major roadways in Washington County closed because of the storm, Machias police and the Department of Transportation temporarily closed the dike between Helen’s and Hadley Lake Road because of zero visibility from blowing snow.
BDN writers Dawn Gagnon, Jen Lynds and Ryan McLaughlin contributed to this report.
