A truck driver from New York was issued a summons Thursday after his tractor-trailer slammed into a Maine State Police cruiser stopped on Interstate 295 in Richmond, injuring a state trooper.
Trooper Greg Stevens, who had stopped to help another motorist, was taken by ambulance to Maine Medical Center in Portland for treatment of injuries that are not considered life-threatening, including broken ribs and neck and leg injuries, said Steve McCausland, spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety. Stevens, a 17-year state police veteran, was able to walk away from the crash.
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The tractor-trailer ended up in the median and caught fire, but the driver was not injured.
Gusan Yedic, 56, of Yorktown Heights, New York, was issued a summons charging him with failing to move over for an emergency vehicle after his tractor-trailer struck Stevens’ cruiser, which was stopped in the breakdown lane with its blue lights flashing, McCausland said.
The crash occurred around 9:45 a.m. near mile 46 after Stevens had checked on another tractor-trailer that had stopped on the highway. That tractor-trailer had merged back into traffic just before Yedic’s truck plowed into Stevens’ cruiser, McCausland said. The impact destroyed the 2015 Ford SUV Stevens was driving.
“The cruiser was struck from behind,” McCausland said. “The trooper’s SUV had been in the breakdown lane just prior to the collision.”
The move-over law, passed in 2007, requires drivers passing a parked emergency vehicle using emergency lights to move into a non-adjacent lane as far as possible from the emergency vehicle.
Stevens’ troop commander, Lt. Aaron Hayden, said in 2013 that in the previous three years, 24 cruisers had been struck from behind while their emergency lights were flashing. Those crashes injured 12 troopers.
Both northbound lanes were closed for nearly two hours at mile 41 after Thursday’s crash. One lane reopened around 11:30 a.m., and both lanes had reopened by 3 p.m., according to Ted Talbot, spokesman for the Maine Department of Transportation.
Officials urged drivers to detour onto U.S. Route 201 to avoid the crash site as northbound traffic backed up for several miles.
The tractor-trailer came to rest in the median strip and caught fire. The fire was knocked down within an hour, but there was a lengthy cleanup, including a large diesel fuel slick that spilled across the road. The fire briefly spread to the grass in the median before firefighters doused the flames.
A team of troopers, as well as firefighters and medics from Gardiner, were called to the crash scene.
The tractor-trailer, which was destroyed, is owned by Yamamoto Carrier Inc., an Illinois-based company. The truck was empty at the time of the crash.
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