Freezing rain Friday morning quickly made roads slick in Bangor and elsewhere in Maine, catching motorists by surprise and causing multiple crashes.
About 10 crashes were reported in the Bangor area.
The biggest one involved five vehicles in Brewer about 10:30 a.m., when an SUV coming from Eddington on North Main Street hit a patch of ice and and hit an embankment.
“It wasn’t a complete rollover by the looks of it, but it did end up on its side,” officer Joseph Everett of the Brewer Police Department said.
Four other vehicles were also involved in the crash, including a pickup truck and three other vehicles. The driver of the pickup truck went to the hospital for injuries that did not appear to be serious, Everett said. Four of the five vehicles had to be towed, and North Main Street between the Eddington town line and Eagle’s Nest Restaurant was closed for about an hour.
The worst crash in Bangor happened around 11 a.m. on Hudson Road where a car landed on its side after hitting a patch of ice. The driver’s injuries might have been serious in that case, according to Bangor Police Officer Andrea Gurecki.
Two cars also skidded off outer Union Street about three hours apart.
The first crash was just beyond the Bangor-Hermon town line at around 11 a.m. It involved an SUV and a minivan that crashed into each other. Both vehicles were towed away. There were two crashes in Hermon overall due to the icy roads on Friday morning, according to Assistant Chief Cody Sullivan of the Hermon Fire Department.
The second crash on Union Street happened around 2 p.m., when an SUV inbound from Hermon slipped on the icy road, hit a utility pole and landed in a field. The vehicle was demolished, Gurecki said. Emera Maine was on scene for repairs after the entire block lost power due to the broken utility pole.
Elsewhere, an ambulance crashed Friday morning on Route 2 in Farmington when it slid off the road and struck a utility pole, according to a report by WMTW. No one was injured in the crash, but power was knocked out to more than 800 Central Maine Power customers, according to the power company.
Emera Maine reported around midday Friday that more than 350 people without electricity in the Dixmont area as a result of a vehicle accident. Each company reported fewer than 100 outages late Friday afternoon.
Earlier Friday, a tractor trailer jackknifed on the Maine Turnpike in Gray, resulting in all southbound lanes being temporarily closed.