PORTAGE – As the owner of Deans Motor Lodge prepares to rebuild the eight-unit motel damaged when a tractor-trailer slid into it last week, she’s thankful it’s only a matter of wood and concrete.

“We were so, so fortunate,” Angie Boutot said. “I can replace a building, but you can’t replace a life.”

Boutot said it was a minor miracle there were no serious injuries early Wednesday, Feb. 13, when New Brunswick trucker Michael Carpenter, 38, lost control of the 2007 International tractor-trailer he was driving on snow-covered Route 11 and slid into the building.

Contrary to information provided to the Bangor Daily News the day of the crash, all but one of the eight rooms in the unit were occupied. One room on the ground floor was demolished, and the entire structure was pushed 4 feet off the foundation.

Carpenter was charged with driving to endanger.

“I can’t imagine how the people in the room next door did not get hurt,” Boutot said. “But they came in to breakfast later that morning as if nothing had happened.”

The initial report, released by Sgt. Julie Bergen of the Maine State Police, stated that three New Hampshire commercial vehicle enforcement troopers had left their upstairs rooms about 15 minutes before the accident.

But in fact, the rooms above the point of impact were occupied at the time by several members of a New Hampshire party in the area for five days of snowmobiling.

The information that three of the occupants were New Hampshire state troopers who had vacated their rooms before the accident was reported in error by the Maine state trooper on the scene, Bergen said.

Among the occupants, only one, Jeff Bonan, was a member of New Hampshire State Police Highway Enforcement. With him in the room was Lt. Ed Cowings of the Guilford, N.H., Police Department.

“Those two guys with us were in room B3 [above the accident] and got woken up by it, [and] they were pretty shook up,” Wes DeSousa, an officer with the Guilford department, said by phone on Monday. “They actually crawled out of the room through the window and stepped out onto the cab of the truck.

“I was sleeping in the cabin across the parking lot when it happened and heard a big noise that sounded like a plow dropping,” DeSousa said.

Ground zero of the accident was room B1, the corner room on the street level. At the time, Boutot said, it was registered to Bob O’Brian, an engineer with Concept Systems Inc. of Albany, Ore.

“I didn’t know if he was still in the room or not,” Boutot said. “I was right panicked.”

Boutot, who lives directly across Route 11 from her motel, did not hear the impact, but soon afterward received a phone call from one of her employees telling her of the accident.

“I really didn’t expect it to be as bad as it was, [and] I just started praying no one was hurt,” she said. “It was still dark and a police officer was looking into [O’Brian’s room] with a flashlight and could see clothes and personal things in there, so I knew someone was registered in that room.”

Soon afterward, however, O’Brian himself showed up, unscathed, at the motel.

Apparently he had left not long before the accident to report for a 6 a.m. engineering contract job at nearby Maine Woods Inc. While on the job, a mill employee told him about the accident back at Deans.

“I just hugged him and told him to go buy a lottery ticket,” Boutot said, adding that O’Brian told her he never again would complain about a mill opening up at 6 a.m.

Efforts to reach O’Brian on Monday were unsuccessful.

The occupants in the other rooms all escaped without injury, though an ax was needed to chop down a door to free a couple in the room next to B1, according to Boutot.

“The people in the room directly above it had to crawl out a window,” she added. “Then other people braved going back in to get their clothes and other things out for them, even from O’Brian’s room.”

Once she’d determined her guests were safe and accounted for, Boutot then turned her attention to finding them alternative lodgings in the area in addition to contacting numerous people holding reservations over the next several weeks.

“These are our two busiest weeks coming up [and] we were completely booked through the second week in March,” she said. “We were full, but I was able to find alternate rooms for all of them.”

Despite the monumental rebuilding job now facing her, Boutot plans to demolish the entire structure and build from scratch.

She was concerned for the truck driver, as well.

“I felt really bad for that trucker,” she said. “He was just devastated after the accident and thinking it could have been so much worse.”

Those same “what if” thoughts have been keeping Boutot up at nights, too. “I just keep thinking how bad it could have been,” she said. But she knows things will eventually get back to normal.

“We have a good business and a really good clientele,” she said, “and we are on the map with our location right on Route 11.

“Of course, I’m a little leery about that location now,” she added.