By Terry Karkos,Staff Writer

RUMFORD – Rumford’s ice jam headed down the Androscoggin River on Tuesday morning, Rumford Deputy Fire Chief Ben Byam said.

“I think that when the water dropped, the ice dropped and away it went,” he said Tuesday afternoon.

Byam said that when he was headed for work at 6 a.m., he saw the jam breaking up as the river carried it over Pennacook Falls dam.

“I glanced at the river and it was unreal. For a good hour, it had a lot of stuff going down,” Byam said.

He said he saw pieces of wood, logs, even trees, and eight 55-gallon drums, sweeping down the river.

“The ice looked like it had gone through a blender that beat the ice up,” Byam said.

There were no problems downstream that he was aware of, when the jam flushed.

He did, however, take a lot of ribbing over the phone and from visitors coming to the fire station regarding his comments in Tuesday’s Sun Journal, he said.

In that story, Byam said Monday that he didn’t think the jam was going anywhere until warmer temperatures arrived.

“I got more than one call on this today,” he added.

By 3 p.m. Tuesday, the Androscoggin River near Auburn remained at 13.4 feet, just slightly above flood stage. By nightfall, it had dipped down below the danger zone.

In Androscoggin County, preliminary damage estimates to roads and property in that county was closing in on $2 million. Joanne Potvin, emergency management director for that area, said damage estimates were more than $1.5 million by the end of the day Tuesday and were expected to rise higher as assessments continued on Wednesday.

Most roads damaged by rising water were passable to motorists by Tuesday night, including Old Farm Road in Lewiston, which had been inaccessible a day before, Potvin said. A section of Route 136 in Durham, near Stackpole Road, was limited to one lane but was otherwise open to traffic.

Dan Schorr, Oxford County Emergency Management Agency director, said Tuesday night that all major highways were open.

He said he knew of no families who were still homeless due to flooding.

Damage, he said, is concentrated in the central part of the county, from Woodstock south to Paris, Norway, Waterford, Oxford and Otisfield, and in the north in Rumford and Mexico.

“When we left the office, we had about 17 towns in the county (reporting), and we were up to about three-quarters of a million” dollars in damage estimates. That represents nearly half of the 36 towns in the county.

In Franklin County, Emergency Management Agency Director Tim Hardy said Tuesday night that as far as he knew, Route 41 in New Sharon was still closed.

“Everything else is opened back up that was flooded,” he said.

Administrative Assistant Olive Toothaker is compiling damage reports from the towns, he said.

“As of noontime today, the ones that she did have come in, the estimate was somewhere around $194,000,” he advised.

“If we’d got the rain that had been originally predicted up here we’d have a lot more damage. We’re fortunate,” the director said. “The other thing that also saved us is we didn’t get the warm temperatures. That would have made a difference, too, as far as the snowmelt.”

Hardy looked at the mountains in the northern part of the county on Tuesday, he said, and “it looks like there’s still a lot of snow left.”

Staff writers Mary Delamater and Mark LaFlamme contributed to this report.