PERU — A young woman from Livermore missed death by seconds after a huge poplar tree fell in front of her car late Wednesday night on Route 108, police said Friday.
Mary Kaye, 24, posted on her Facebook page that she didn’t see the tree’s branches in her lane because of fog and another driver flashing his car’s high beams at her. She drove through the tree’s crown with her 2004 Hyundai.
Skid marks showed she braked to a stop in the emergency lane, her car covered with leaves and broken branches.
Kaye said Oxford County Sgt. Timothy Holland told her that had the tree fallen any other way she wouldn’t be alive.
“That tree fell just as she was coming along,” Holland said Friday afternoon.
The tree broke away from its base and fell across a drainage ditch and the road. Peru fire Chief Bill Hussey said Thursday that he believes heavy rains this week may have loosened the tree’s base and weighed down leaves.
Holland said the motorist who flashed high beams was driving northwest, saw the tree fall and managed to stop and avoid hitting it, but Kaye didn’t.
“She was covered in glass,” Holland said.
A Med-Care Ambulance crew picked glass out of Kaye’s face and treated her at the scene, he said. She refused transport to Rumford Hospital.
Kaye said Thursday that she was sore from the accident and her eye that had glass in it was still hurting. “It was scary as hell,” she said.
She recently moved to Livermore from Franklin, N.H., and was on her way home from work when the accident happened.
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