By Teddy Rydquist
Leader Staff Writer
Beginning at 10:30 a.m., last Thursday (July 16), motorists near the area of W. Drahner and Pontiac roads were inconvenienced by road closures and many residents living in the proximity suffered a loss of power for several hours.
These issues were the result of a flatbed semi-truck attempting an ill-advised turn.
“What I learned from the officer who actually wrote the report, the first cause of action, I guess you could call it, or the first contact with anything over there was his trailer hitting the pole,” said Oakland County Sheriff’s Sgt. Frank Lenz, second in command at the Oxford substation.
“So, a combination of his trailer hitting the pole and then the (telephone) wires sagging. So, yes, he did hit it (the telephone pole) with the side of his trailer because he had a 53-foot trailer and he couldn’t make that turn.
“He only went that way because he was from out-of-state and, with the construction, he wasn’t sure which way to go. He needed to go right or left at Drahner and he chose left.”
After making the left from Lapeer Road onto W. Drahner, the driver of the truck tried to make the right turn to head north on Pontiac Road, striking the telephone pole located at the intersection in the process.
Fortunately, no one, including the driver, suffered any injuries because of the incident.
Several nearby residents, however, had the power at their homes knocked out, many of them for several hours.
“At around 11 (a.m.), we were sitting in my basement and the power flickered twice,” said Bre Budzyn, a resident of the Lakes of Indianwood subdivision, which stretches from Indianwood Road in Lake Orion to W. Drahner. “It all came back on then, knocked out the clocks, but we didn’t actually lose it until about 4:15 in the afternoon, when it went out for good and then it came back on at about 10:15 p.m. We’re probably about a half-mile away from there, but people were knocked out all the way up by the library, that entire Glenmoor (subdivision) was knocked out, too.”
Closing W. Drahner from Pathfinder Trail to Glenmoor Drive and Pontiac Road from W. Drahner to Rolfe Road, Detroit Thomas Edison (DTE Energy) responded to the scene to repair the damage and Oakland County Sheriffs were able to remove the roadblocks at 11:30 p.m.
Despite the six-hour loss of power stretching from the late-afternoon to night, Budzyn made the best of the situation.
“A lot of us were scrambling for pizza,” she said with a laugh.
“There were some little girls who set up a Kool-Aid stand in the Glenmoor subdivision and I think the fire department posted they stopped by, so, I thought it was really smart of them to, you know, monopolize on all the people cutting through their subdivision.”
According to a Facebook post from a mother and resident of the Glenmoor on the Lake subdivision, these children made $60 from this impromptu Kool-Aid stand. Not bad for a group of elementary-age children on summer vacation!