LINCOLN – Jaimi Cole was looking forward to Thanksgiving at home. The 33-year-old secretary had a refrigerator full of holiday food and a new backyard, courtesy of about $420 worth of drainage work on her leaching field. She figured she had things to be thankful for.

Then she heard noises.

“It was all these creaking and popping sounds, like an oil barrel makes,” Cole said Tuesday.

Cole and her nieces, 15-year-old Mikala Cole and 10-year-old Breanna Sutherland, started searching. Cole went into the basement and saw that the east side of the cement foundation was heavily cracked and gushing water.

“You could hear it and see it coming in,” Cole said. “I just told everybody to get out immediately.”

As they fled the house, they could see that the ground in front of the front door was saturated and the porch was sinking into the muck. At 5:40 p.m., she and four other family members were outside in the rain with only their medications, coats and a cat named Gabby.

When firefighters arrived 11 minutes later, rushing water had flooded the dirt-floor basement, the mud along 40 feet of the front of the house had sunk as much as 3 feet and the foundation was pushing a large oil tank toward the center of the basement, fire Chief Joshua L. Williams said.

The walls and foundation along the opposite side of the house near a rear door had also started to crack and bow, Williams said.

Firefighters didn’t try to enter the house for fear it would collapse. They cordoned it off and called the state Department of Environmental Protection and Bangor Hydro-Electric Co. to shut off the building’s electricity.

Williams and Cole were mystified as to why the foundation gave. Built in 1955, the one-story building otherwise seemed in good shape. It hadn’t had similar problems in the almost six years the Coles have lived there, said Paula Cole, Jaimi’s 60-year-old mother.

However, the road grades slightly toward the house, several large puddles of water had formed in the front yard and the house lies on a gently sloping 900-foot plain between West Broadway and the Penobscot River.

“We’re just glad that this happened before we had gotten to sleep,” Jaimi Cole said.

The Coles were planning to stay at the Lincoln House Motel courtesy of the American Red Cross and then perhaps at a relative’s house. The house is insured, Jaimi Cole said.

Even before firefighters left the Cole’s neighbors were helping out. Sue Johnstone, wife of the youth pastor at Community Evangel Temple, brought an oxygen tank for Paula Cole, who suffers from a diastolic heart condition and pulmonary hypertension.

The Coles still hope to have a good Thanksgiving, but they’re not sure where, or when. Except for a single turkey they left in their SUV, the food is still in the house.