Allagash man, 97, found OK in crashed car Driver was trapped 22 hours

ALLAGASH – In remarkably good shape, a 97-year-old Allagash man was resting and recuperating Wednesday at his Walker Brook home after being stranded by himself in his wrecked car for more than 22 hours last weekend.

Ransford McBreairty, who according to caregivers will turn 98 next week, was treated at the Northern Maine Medical Center at Fort Kent on Saturday and then released.

He had spent nearly one full day alone in a car that went over an embankment Friday across the street from where he lives. Tree branches, which supported his car in the air, kept the car from plummeting another 15 feet into the Little Black River.

McBreairty, who lives alone, was taking his car out of the garage to wash it in his driveway shortly after 1 p.m. Friday.

“It’s kind of funny how it all happened,” McBreairty said Wednesday. “I was bringing the car ahead and it took off.”

The vehicle apparently had no brakes. McBreairty surmised there may have been a hole in a brake line and all the brake fluid had leaked out.

“It went down the driveway, crossed the road and down into the woods,” he recounted. “I was there that entire day and one night before I was found.

“I’m OK. They took me to the hospital,” he said. “They strapped me on a board and carried me up the bank to put me in the ambulance.”

He said he was still sore Wednesday from his adventure. He didn’t eat the entire time he was in the car, he said, but the worst thing was not being able to get comfortable. And he didn’t sleep at all, he said.

He said he honked the horn of the 1988 Oldsmobile a few times, but he said he worried about turning on the ignition for fear of the car catching fire.

Beth Ann Thibodeau, a certified nurse’s aide who is also McBreairty’s home health nurse, said her client must have gone out almost as soon as she left Friday.

“He’s very sore, weak and black-and-blue, but he will be OK,” she said from McBrearity’s home Wednesday. “He was very lucky because the trees held his car from going over, and the river is right there.”

She said most of the time McBreairty does well alone. He has a sister living in Allagash and two sons who live in Caribou.

Thibodeau alerted the community after others called her to report the old man missing.

“People got together to find him,” she said. “All the time, he was just across the road.”

Vicky Hafford, a nurse who lives in Allagash, found McBreairty.

“He had been missing and I was looking from my car,” she said Wednesday. “I was looking for skid marks and not seeing any, then I saw some faint marks.

“I got out of the car and was walking along the bank when I saw a glitter through the trees,” she said. “When I went down the bank and was approaching, he was yelling out so I knew he was all right.”

Hafford said McBreairty told her of being there since the day before, about 20 hours or so.

“It was amazing. You know he will be 98 next week,” Hafford said. “He’s tough, and he was still in good spirits, very pleasant, when I found him.

“He was very happy when I found him, and even happier when they helped him out,” Hafford said. “It was just luck that I found him because it was thick woods. It was evident something had gone through the trees.”

She said it was awful seeing where he went down, about 75 feet from the roadway. Another 15 feet and he would have been in the water.

“The car was sitting right there in the trees,” she said. But “he’s tough. He’ll make it.”