LEWISTON – Cars crashing and sliding off the road. Parking bans and a rush on area supermarkets. On Thursday, mid-April was looking a lot like January. A predicted snowstorm moving into the area brought with it the usual array of problems as the storm intensified before dark.

By the afternoon commute, sticky snow made roads sloppy everywhere. Crashes were reported across Lewiston, Auburn and the tri-county area, on highways, avenues and side roads.

At 4:30 p.m., a car rolled over on Riverside Drive in Auburn, briefly trapping the driver inside the overturned vehicle.

Milton A. Simon, 53, of Durham, was freed unharmed from his Ford, and a tow company was called to pull the car from between trees.

An hour earlier, two tractor-trailers jackknifed at separate spots on Route 26 in Poland. One truck slid across the road at Five Corners.

Another spun out of control near the Poland Spring Inn. The result: a long section of one of Poland’s busiest throughways completely blocked to traffic.

“When you have the road blocked at two locations, it’s kind of a mess,” an Androscoggin County dispatcher said.

A tractor-trailer with a flatbed rolled off the Maine Turnpike between Falmouth and Gray at about 4 p.m., spilling a load at the side of the road. The ensuing cleanup caused a traffic backup in the southbound lane for at least a mile.

In Rumford, a section of Route 2 at Falls Hill was closed about 4:30 p.m. until a crew could sand it.

Ironically, one of the more spectacular wrecks of the day had nothing to do with the weather. A crash in which a man drove his SUV into a porch on Minot Avenue in Auburn Thursday was due to driver inattention, police said. The crash at 968 Minot Ave. occurred before snow began to fall.

While police moved from one crash to the next, and worried residents flocked to stores for supplies, a person could not even retreat to a springtime passion for solace – the Boston Red Sox’s third game at home was postponed because of foul weather.

At a time when most people expect to worry about lawn maintenance more than snow shoveling, some blamed the media for hyping the storm long before the first flakes fell.

“It’s Maine. You should expect stuff like this,” said 31-year-old Janet Smith of Auburn. “If you don’t like it, move.”

Smith acknowledged that lingering winter was getting tough to take, but she said she was keeping it in perspective. Things could be worse.

“Sure, I’d love to see green grass, but hey. We don’t get hurricanes and we don’t get tornadoes,” Smith said. “It’s snowing, but I still have my house.”

Bob Coulombe’s pain was more about business. He operates a car lot and the snow messes with sales as well as logistics.

“I have to keep moving the cars around and cleaning them off,” he said. “I should be done with this by now.”

By 5 p.m., five inches of snow had fallen in Poland. Three inches had dropped on Lewiston and Auburn, nearly six had fallen on Gray, and Bridgton saw nearly nine inches. Eight to 12 inches were expected in western portions of the state, four to eight in Androscoggin County.

The wet, heavy snow was a concern for power crews who feared electrical lines might topple under its weight. But the same conditions caused Coulombe a moment to pause as he looked around at the snow clinging to tree branches and everything else in the visible world.

“I will say one thing,” Coulombe said. “It is pretty.”