TURNER – The driver of a truck hauling chicken manure said Thursday he’s lucky to be alive after the vehicle clipped a utility pole, sailed through the air, smashed two trees and landed on the driver’s side.
Darren Gile, 46, of Livermore Falls suffered only scrapes and bruises. Before heading to the hospital for leg X-rays, he went home and showered off the feces and spilled diesel oil, he said. The X-rays came back negative.
He was driving the roughly 30-year-old International farm truck on Route 219 Wednesday afternoon from Mountain Hollow Farms in Leeds to the Turner pits on the Plains Road. He planned to dump his load at a holding area where it would be hauled off later.
The bumpy road caused something in the truck’s front end to let go, he said.
“That road is horrible. It’s all frost heaves up through there.”
The next thing he knew, he couldn’t steer or make the brakes work.
The truck veered across the center line, hit a telephone pole, then launched more than 20 feet in the air. Before landing in a gully, it smashed two trees.
“I had a death grip on the steering wheel,” he said. “All I could do was hang on and pray to God. I’m lucky I’m alive.”
After the truck smashed onto its side, he crawled out through the windshield and up the embankment to the road. Then he yelled for help. He later crawled back into the wrecked cab to retrieve his glasses.
Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Deputy Travis Lovering said an investigation into the cause of the accident was inconclusive. State police responded to the scene, but the evidence was too scattered to pinpoint the exact cause, Lovering said. Mechanical failure might be to blame, he said. Route 219 was shut down for hours after the crash.
Cleanup crews showed up Thursday to haul away three dump trucks full of soil contaminated by diesel fuel and feces. Environmental officials were concerned about a residential well about 120 feet from the site as well as a nearby stream.
Manure was thrown about 100 feet after the truck made impact, said Jon Andrews, an oil and hazardous materials specialist at the Department of Environmental Protection.
Had the area been flooded the way it normally would be this time of year, the environmental damage would have been more serious, he said.
Officials at the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration also made inquiries after the crash, Lovering said.
Gile, a registered Maine Guide, said this wasn’t his closest brush with death. He once fell 60 feet on a construction site, he said.
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