LEWISTON – The first cars began sliding off the roads Thursday about 4 p.m., minutes after the first snowflakes began to fall.
A half hour later, police in Auburn shut down Goff Hill briefly while public works crews treated the road. Similar scenes played out across the Twin Cities as snow moved quickly into the area and immediately began to slick roads.
In Lewiston and Auburn, there were a handful of minor collisions between 4 and 5 p.m. Then drivers began slowing down, and it was mostly quiet again during the evening commute.
It was even uneventful on the back roads.
“People seem to be driving appropriately so far,” said Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Deputy Tom Slivinski, who was patrolling in Poland.
By 5:30 p.m., he had not been called out to a single accident. “Let’s hope it stays that way,” Slivinski said.
It didn’t. Over the next two hours, the deputy responded to three vehicles off the road, two collisions and two instances of tractor-trailers stuck on Route 26.
A trailer that got stuck on the section of 26 near Lake Shore Road blocked traffic for roughly an hour. Transportation crews came out with sand and shoveled under the tires of the rig.
That truck got on its way, but the driver of a second Wal-Mart truck had to stop on the hill when oncoming traffic slid into his lane. That stoppage caused police to block the same section of Route 26 while they got the Wal-Mart truck moving again.
Other deputies responded to a collision on Route 106 in Leeds about 5 p.m. There, the driver of one vehicle was reportedly belligerent, but no serious injuries were reported.
Three inches or less were forecast for the Thursday storm predicted to be standard for the state in December. Yet, lines at area supermarkets were long with shoppers stocking up on water, batteries, canned goods and other staples that go fast during winter storms.
More fearsome for some Thursday was the cold. It was 16 degrees in Lewiston by nightfall and only a couple of degrees warmer on the coast.
Weather forecasters say a bigger storm moving in on the state could dump a foot of snow during the latter part of the weekend.
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