Ann Duddy was sitting at her desk at Current Publishing on Main Street Monday afternoon when she heard a car crash outside. She turned to see a car careening toward the building.
Duddy, a sales associate, sits beside a glass-door entrance to 840 Main St., and she said she thought the car was going to come in directly at her. She yelled to a coworker and tried to scramble onto her desk before it hit. Sliding sideways across the street, the car narrowly missed the glass doors and broke through the outside wall and into her coworker’s office.
“I knew there was something out on the street,” said Mark Hews, advertising sales manager, when he heard the initial crash. “I thought it was a bad accident.” And then he said he heard another impact and saw the front bumper of the car crash through his office wall.
According to police, at about 1 p.m., James Lapointe, 48, of Spring Street, was exiting a parking lot adjacent to TD Banknorth in his Mercury Cougar when he collided with a Volkswagen Golf driven by Jacqueline Lyons, 18, of Kittery Point, traveling west on Main Street.
Lapointe’s car struck Lyons’ vehicle on the front passenger side. After the collision, police said, Lyons lost control of her vehicle and slammed into 840 Main St., the main office of Current Publishing, the parent company of the American Journal and seven other weekly newspapers.
“I heard the initial impact and then, when the vehicle hit the building, I thought one of the cars had exploded,” said Genella Douglas, a sales associate who works in the office next to Hews’ office.
The accident created a large crack running down the wall of Hews’ office from the ceiling to the floor. Police said Lyons was taken by ambulance to a Portland hospital for observation. Lyons was not wearing her seat belt at the time of the accident, police said. Although no one was injured inside the building, several of the Current Publishing employees were startled by the incident.
Duddy said it took her a couple hours to calm down after seeing the car coming at her. Hews, however, said he wasn’t as frightened by the incident as he would have expected. He said he thought maybe the sound was louder in different parts of the office.
As far as Hews’ office is concerned, the fire department made some minor repairs on Monday to close the hole temporarily. It’s a few degrees colder in his office, and he’ll need a new wall and wallpaper, though.
A two-car accident on Main Street in Westbrook this afternoon sent one vehicle careening into a wall 840 Main Street. 
The interior wall of an office at Current Publishing’s Westbrook location shows the damage caused by Monday afternoon’s two-car accident.
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