GRAFTON — A mile of Route 4 in Grafton was closed for more than eight hours Saturday after a motorist slid into a utility pole knocking the lines to the ground.
Grafton firefighters responded to a call at about 7:45 a.m., after a small SUV struck the pole on the corner of Route 4 — also known as Main Street — and Library Road, Fire Chief Alan Gove said in a Tuesday phone interview.
“It was like a skating rink,” Gove said about the road conditions at the time of the crash.
The motorist who hit the utility pole was not injured and speed was not a factor, Gove said.
“We had a transformer that fell down and crashed on the ground,” Gove said. “It was all power lines and telephone lines and fiber optic lines.”
The utility pole the motorist hit was older and not as strong as others in the vicinity.
“That one hadn’t been replaced yet so when they hit it, it just disintegrated,” Gove said, adding that since the accident Eversource, which owns the utility pole, has replaced it with a newer, stronger pole.
“Quite a few homes” were without power when the road was closed, he said.
Because oil leaked out from the transformer when it hit Route 4, the fire department needed to call in a hazmat team from Clean Harbors, a southern New Hampshire-based company, to respond to clean it up. New Hampshire State Police officers also responded, Gove said.
There were 13 volunteer firefighters on the scene all day, helping direct traffic around the downed power lines. Grafton was the only fire department there.
The department responds to calls of downed power lines multiple times a year, Gove said.
“A lot of places, trees come down and take the lines down,” he said. “Either weather or cars. In that case there was weather and a car.”