DIXFIELD — A Carthage man was seriously injured Tuesday afternoon when he lost control of a pickup truck on Route 2 and slid sideways into an oncoming commercial truck, police said.
Nathan Conley, 23, suffered head and leg injuries in the 3:15 p.m. accident and was taken by Med-Care Ambulance to Rumford Hospital, Dixfield police officer Anne Simmons-Edmunds said.
A nursing supervisor at the hospital said Conley was transferred by Med-Care to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.
Two other men involved in the accident, Alan Linkletter, 39, of Athens, and his passenger, Calvin Cates, 51, of Moscow, suffered minor injuries and declined to go to the hospital. They were in a 1-ton Ford F-350 commercial truck owned by Linkletter and Sons Inc. of Athens.
Loggers Linkletter and Cates said they were returning to Athens with fellow crewmen in other company trucks during a snowstorm when the accident occurred. It was about a half-mile west of Common Road and right before a series of S-turns, which Conley was coming out of.
“He was sideways just as we were coming to him,” said Linkletter, who tried to avoid the collision by steering into the eastbound emergency lane. “We had enough time to say, ‘Oh, (expletive),’ and then we hit hard.”
The impact crushed the passenger side of the black pickup and mangled the front-end of the commercial truck.
“I’m glad he didn’t have a passenger, because they would have been killed,” Linkletter said.
Simmons-Edmunds said Conley was headed to work at Sunday River Ski Resort in Newry.
Dixfield firefighters limited traffic to one lane for about an hour and removed debris from the road.
Simmons-Edmunds said road conditions were “sloppy, wet and slippery.”
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