by Marty Green ·
Friday, June 28, 2024
An unsecured door on a truck led to a major collision with an SUV on Poor Farm Road earlier this week. The truck, belonging to Chestnut Tree and Landscape, was carrying a dumpster and going east up Poor Farm from Ayer Road a little after 3 p.m. Tuesday.
A heavily damaged SUV sits on Poor Farm Road after a June 25 accident. The driver was injured and transported to UMass Memorial while five passengers were transported to Nashoba Valley Medical Center. (Photo courtesy of the Harvard Public Safety Drone Team)
According to a police press release, one of the truck’s doors was unfastened and swung open, hitting a telephone pole along the road. The force of that blow caused the dumpster on the back of the truck to break loose and swing crossways, striking an SUV that was heading west down Poor Farm in the other lane.
All six people in the SUV were taken to hospitals by ambulance. The SUV driver, whose injuries appeared the most serious, was taken to the trauma center at UMass Memorial Hospital in Worcester as a precaution, according to Lt. Andrew Perry of the Harvard Fire Department, who was at the scene. However, the driver’s injuries were less severe than they first seemed.
“It was a miracle,” Harvard Police Chief James Babu wrote in an email, that everyone in both vehicles was all right. Babu also said the commercial driver licensing office of the state police had issued a citation to the landscaping company for failing to do a pretrip inspection of the truck. However, Babu said, the outcome of that citation is not clear yet.