JAY, Maine — Neighbors came out with the sun on Friday morning in Jay, to see the damage nature had wrought the night before.
As much as six inches of rain fell in a three-hour span on Thursday evening, the Maine Department of Transportation estimated. Parts of Franklin and Oxford counties felt the torrent, but the town of Jay received the worst abuse.
Around 11:30 a.m., Fire Chief Mike Booker stopped his truck on Maycomber Hill Road and shook his head. The storm had swollen a tiny stream that passed through massive culverts under part of the road.
Now, there's a hole 50 feet wide and 30 feet deep, with twisted guardrails and trees drooping into the breach. The waterway, not quite back to its original size, snaked into the woods. It went past a handful of metal culverts — each as large as a small RV — which had been hurled as easily as plastic cups from a dinner table.
Booker spoke as a firefighter in the passenger seat pointed out a batch of photos on his iPad, depicting some of the myriad washouts, cracked roads, and otherwise impassable roads.
Fewer than 12 roads, Booker said, were navigable in his town by 12 p.m.
By 12:30 p.m., Booker had left. Lisa Gund and Desiree Abbott arrived in a Jeep and gasped at the destruction. They said they were two of the few people in their Farmington neighborhood whose driveways weren’t washed away.
"Some people can’t even get to their mailbox right now," Gund said.
So, the pair went to check on the people of nearby Jay.
"This is just all damage," Abbott remarked.
"And it was fast and hard," Gund added.
Two miles down Route 4, Matt Brennick got back to work. The owner of the restaurant My Dad's Place, Brennick thought he was safe on a small hill. As the rain worsened Thursday, he quickly sent his employees home early, before they’d be trapped by the muddy river coming down the road.
"I saw a fire truck, and I kinda looked around, and everything just started flooding. It was very fast," Brennick said.
It would take weeks to fix some of the roadways, said Maine DOT spokesman Paul Merrill; one or two days for others.
But questions remained. How could people and governments protect homes and roads on high ground — miles from the mighty Androscoggin River — when it was tiny streams that caused the destruction?
"I'm not sure that anybody can quickly put their finger on the name of any of those creeks that run underneath [the roads]," Merrill told reporters Friday.
"It’ll factor into the way that we try to plan for resilience in terms of upsizing culverts and strengthening infrastructure so that if we have a freak event, we’re better able to handle that," Merrill said.
Booker said no one had reported an injury Friday related to the storm. But, he said, several mountain roads had been completely cut off from the rest of town.
His own road was among them. Before he drove away from Maycomber Hill Road, his phone consistently vibrated as he coordinated the department's town-wide response, while waiting for results from wellness checks on those now isolated.