Police: Massachusetts man's foot slipped onto gas pedal before Belgrade hopper ... - Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel
A Massachusetts man’s foot accidentally slipped onto his gas pedal, which sent his truck into a garbage hopper at the Belgrade transfer station on Saturday, police say. The landfill closed three hours early on Saturday after the crash, which was reported around noon and didn’t injure 75-year-old David Shea, of Marblehead, Massachusetts, and caused only “minor damage” to the hopper, said Sgt. Estes said that transfer station employees shut off the hopper and helped Shea out of his 1999 Ford F150, and that a crane was brought into the landfill to take the vehicle, which sustained “significant damage,” out of the hopper. At the station on Saturday, station manager Ken Scheno said he didn’t want to comment on the incident, but he said that the station would be open on Tuesday. Garbage thrown into the hopper slides down the sides into the hole, where a block of steel pushes the garbage into a dumpster behind the hopper. It’s surrounded by a wall about 3 feet high on the outside, where residents pull up and toss garbage in, but one side is open, barred by a chain, a bar and a curb a few inches high, where pickup and garbage trucks back in to dump larger loads. Source: www.centralmaine.com
