ANDOVER – An elderly Andover woman escaped serious injury Tuesday afternoon when her minivan struck a utility pole, flipped on its roof, and she was pinned under live wires on Rumford Center Road.
Med-Care Ambulance took driver Wilmia Holmes, 71, to Rumford Hospital, where she was treated and released, hospital spokeswoman Jane Bubar said late Tuesday afternoon.
Holmes had crawled out of the white 1997 Plymouth Voyager and was standing near the wires at the back of the minivan, dazed, when her husband, Lawrence Holmes, came running down the street, he said of the 12:25 p.m. accident.
“I hollered at her to get away from the wires,” Lawrence Holmes said.
One live wire was taut across the van’s rear plastic bumper, inches away from a metal tow hitch; the other live wire, just above the tires.
The pole’s transformer lay on its side nearby, leaking fluid onto the road.
“All that wire had to do was slide up and hit that tow hitch, and it would have been all over. If that had been a steel bumper, the wire would have electrified the whole car,” Lawrence Holmes said.
At the scene nearly 30 minutes after the wreck, a Central Maine Power lineman, who declined to be identified, said the situation “was very hazardous, because the line was energized.”
About 12:20 p.m., Lawrence Holmes said that his wife, a Community Concepts driver, drove his minivan from their house to pick someone up in Rumford.
Shortly after she left, the power flickered at the house, then the phone rang. It was his wife.
“She said she hit a telephone pole. I didn’t ask her how she was, I just went flying down the road. I’m glad I got there when I did,” Lawrence Holmes said.
The accident happened about a half mile from their house, and about three miles northwest of East Andover Road.
After getting his wife away from the wires, he said he learned she had banged a knee.
Wilmia Holmes told her husband the accident happened when “a book or something” fell on the floor, and she reached for it.
The van veered off the road onto the soft shoulder, then the passenger-side front-end severed the pole and front wheel.
She was wearing a safety belt and the driver-side air bag deployed.
Andover firefighters and Andover Rescue responded, along with Trooper James Nolan. Information could not be confirmed from Nolan.
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