Stranger repairs wind damage for elderly woman
By Terry Karkos
Staff Writer

MEXICO – A good Samaritan boosted the spirits of an elderly Backkingdom Road resident Thursday following Wednesday night’s stormy weather.

Edie Wentzell, 79, said she was awakened at midnight Wednesday by loud noises outside her trailer, which is located on a semi-open slope.

“Oh, my word! The wind was wicked up here,” Wentzell said Friday.

“I got up at 12 o’clock in the night when I heard an awful racket and took my walker and went over to see if the big tree in my yard had blown down, but it hadn’t,” she said.

It wasn’t until Thursday morning when she learned what had happened. A neighbor came over and said the storm had lifted a section of her trailer’s metal roof up.

“I was sick with worry, afraid that something would go off and into the trailer in back of me. But later on, a stranger – an angel in disguise – came by and fixed my roof for nothing,” she added.

Shortly before the storm hit, the National Weather Service in Gray issued a heavy wind advisory, saying that the area could be hit with sustained winds gusting between 30 and 55 mph.

But a meteorologist said Thursday that winds only gusted between 30 and 45 mph across western Maine and New Hampshire.

Elsewhere Friday afternoon, the Androscoggin River had begun to recede after rising to 10 feet, 5 feet below flood stage at Rumford.

The Swift River, however, threatened to spill over its banks at its confluence with the Androscoggin between Rumford and Mexico. Farther upstream, the Swift continued to rage down its channel, attracting photographers.

Onlookers also stopped at the Information Booth in Rumford to photograph the boisterous Androscoggin as it churned over Pennacook Falls opposite Route 2 on Falls Hill.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com