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Carl (carma48) posted an update Wednesday, Dec 20, 2023, 5:52am EST, 4 months, 1 week ago
Mahnin'All: An update on the wild conditions here. It is far worse than the "passing mention" reported by most national news coverage. Yesterday water surged over the bridge on the Swift River, connecting Rumford and Mexico. A car with 4 people tried to drive over it anyway & was swept off the bridge. Two people rescued, but the other two & the car have not been found yet.
Right now, much of Maine is a case of "you can't get there from here". According to Oxford County Emergancy Management, Rumford is still cut off from everywhere else. All roads in & out are flooded, outright gone or blocked by trees & utility poles. Andover is the same. According to OCEM, we can drive down out road about 3 miles & up our road about 4 miles, but that's it! We can't even get to downtown Andover to Mills Market. There are 4 roads going in & out of Andover and all of them are closed. At least two of them are completely washed away & the status of the other two are both uncertain. Also, as of last night, even if we could get out of Andover, we could not get to Auburn to see Marley & Emma for Christmas. All roads between here & Auburn are closed at some point. In many cases rivers are still rising & haven't crested yet. The plan was to go down to see them on Friday, but we just don't know yet if we'll be able to get there by then. There are still almost 300,000 without power.
We're going to take drive in the Jeep today & see just where we can or cannot get.