Icy road conditions on Monday played a role in three separate tractor-trailer crashes in three hours along a roughly 50-mile stretch of northern Maine highway.
All three crashes happened on Route 11, the main highway between the upper end of Route 95 and Fort Kent.
The first crash was reported just after 9 a.m. in Masardis, where state police said the boom of an overfilled log truck got snagged in overhead power lines at an intersection.
Masardis is home to a sawmill acquired by Irving Forest Products exactly a year before Monday’s crash.
Northbound traffic on Route 11 was blocked at the intersection for several hours, according to state police, who reported no injuries.
The second crash was reported shortly after 9:30 a.m. in Nashville Plantation.
A Maine Forest Service ranger in the area went to the scene and found a 2007 Kia Spectra that had slid off the road and hit a guardrail.
As the forest ranger was trying to shut down the road using his patrol vehicle, a loaded log truck came around a blind curve, slid on the icy road while the driver was trying to stop, jackknifed and hit the back of the ranger’s vehicle.
The ranger was out of the vehicle at the time, but the driver of the Kia was inside and was taken to a hospital with minor injuries, state police said. The ranger and the driver of the log truck were not injured.
Shortly after noon, state police responded to a report of a tractor-trailer off the road near the intersection of Route 11 and Winding Hill Road in Patten.
The truck driver had lost control on the icy road and taken out three utility poles, leaving power lines across both lanes of travel, police said. Route 11 was closed in both directions for several hours.
The truck was a 2013 Peterbilt. A state police spokesperson did not know what cargo, if any, it was carrying at the time of the crash.
