LEWISTON — A crew working to repair a damaged power line made an odd discovery under Park Street on Friday morning: a cache of candy, clothes and plastic bags containing notes hidden in a transformer vault.
CMP workers on the scene, who declined to be identified, said it appeared that someone had been sleeping in the vault under the sidewalk on the east side of Park Street between the Sun Journal offices and the Lewiston Post Office.
Lewiston police spokesman Lt. Michael McGonagle said it looked more like a trash dump.
“There is no evidence that anyone was living in there,” he said. “There are just so many electrical wires down there, someone would have to be crazy to actually climb down in it.”
CMP was working to repair a power line inadvertently damaged by a St. Laurent crew working on the Park Street water line.
CMP workers found the unusual cache when workers opened the vault to locate the damaged electrical line.
Workers said the grates usually cannot be opened, but it appeared this grate had been damaged by a snowplow, allowing someone to pull it up. That person had pushed electrical wires connecting a transformer to the rest of the downtown out of the way, forming a crude ladder down into the vault.
Workers removed several pairs of jeans, a black corset and some light jackets from the hole, as well as plastic baggies full of Valentine candy hearts and black jelly beans.
They also found a cellphone and a Maine driver’s license belonging to a woman from Strong, but they did not know whether those items had been placed in the vault or had fallen through the grate. CMP called Lewiston police to check on two smaller plastic bags that crewmen thought were suspicious.
Workers said they could see an ATM card and a dark blue tarp under a similar grate on the other side of the transformer, but they could not reach it.
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- Brian Rose from the Lewiston Police Department and a crew from Central Maine Power look into an underground transformer vault on Pine Street Friday after the CMP crew found items such as a Maine driver’s license, a debit card, letters, and soaps.
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- Brian Rose of the Lewiston Police Department goes through sealed plastic bags of notes that were found in an underground transformer vault on Pine Street on Friday.
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- Brian Rose of the Lewiston Police Department and a crew from Central Maine Power look into an underground transformer vault on Pine Street on Friday after the CMP crew found items including a Maine driver’s license, a debit card, letters and soap.
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- Workers from Central Maine Power remove clothing from an underground transformer vault on Pine Street Friday while trying to find the source for an underground wire that was hit during construction. The CMP crew thought maybe the vault had been lived in sometime after they found items such as a Maine driver’s license, a debit card, letters, and soaps.
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