AUBURN – Guy Mahon has had trash bags, tires, lumber and piles of gravel litter his Poland Road front yard, but this was different.

He was working in his backyard about 11:30 a.m. Saturday when he heard a horrible crash in his front yard.

“It sounded like a car wreck out there,” he said. He turned around to see two 7-foot-long pieces of aluminum – one, a tall tube, the other some sort of track for curtains or blinds – cartwheeling down the street behind a truck, angling for the sidewalk.

“I see people walking there all the time, and if someone had been there, that would have been it,” he said. “Someone would’ve been killed.”

Mahon, of 216 Poland Road, and neighbors Sylvia Laflamme, of 211 Poland Road, and Jean Bolduc, of 214 Poland Road, brought the poles to Auburn’s City Council meeting Monday night to prove a point and demand councilors do something.

“They could start by giving tickets to trucks with uncovered loads, but there’s a lot they can do,” he said.

Mahon and his neighbors blame large trucks using Poland Road as a shortcut for the mess in general, but specifically for those aluminum rods. He guesses the truck Saturday was headed for Mid-Maine Waste Action Corp.’s transfer station on Goldthwaite Road, but it doesn’t matter.

“We get trucks carrying trash, we get trucks making deliveries or carrying gravel, all taking the shortcut along Poland Road,” he said. “I’ve lived here for 33 years, and it’s been going on all the time. I can’t tell you how many tires I’ve had to replace because of nails on the road. I had one truck drop gravel and then a second whiz by and send pieces flying like bullets.”

But Saturday’s aluminum pole was too much. A piece of gravel might damage a windshield, but he figures something the size of that pole could end a life.

“That pole, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said. “I decided then and there that I would do whatever it takes to get this problem fixed. It’s something I wish I’d done years ago.”

There are multiple causes, he said. Big trucks use Poland Road to get to MMWAC or the Rodman Road industrial area. The road has started to get rutted and bumpy, and some truck drivers don’t obey the speed limit, he said. And since most of the loads aren’t covered, Mahon said, the combination means they spray debris everywhere.

He urged councilors to post a weight limit on the road, forcing the larger trucks to find alternate routes. Police could enforce speed limits, as well as ticket trucks with uncovered loads.

“All they’d have to do is position someone down at the entrance to the dump and check to see which ones are not covered,” he said. “I can guarantee, it would be one right after the other with trucks coming in.”

Councilors said they’d consider action.

“Now they are aware of it, so we’ll see how quickly they move,” he said. “I intend to do anything I legally can to make this problem go away.”