BANGOR – An accident that left a construction site flagger in serious condition at Eastern Maine Medical Center heightens the need for drivers to be cautious as Maine’s construction season now is in its prime, according to state officials.

“Flagging is really one of the most important jobs out there,” Dana Hanks, transportation systems manager at the Maine Department of Transportation’s Augusta office, said Friday. “It’s also one of the most dangerous because the flagger is really the first one to be exposed to approaching traffic.”

Every year in Maine there are about 700 work zone crashes, Hanks said.

“Some involve injuries, some don’t,” he said.

There also are between zero and six fatalities in construction zones each year, according to Hanks. The accident statistics include crashes between cars, but also can involve workers in the area.

One such crash occurred Monday when utility workers from Crystal Clear Communications had a steel cable stretched across Ohio Street near where Larry McGregor, 66, was directing traffic for another construction crew working on Finson Road.

The two projects were unrelated, and the communications company wasn’t using a flagger. Representatives from Crystal Clear Communications couldn’t be reached Friday for comment.

According to what some witnesses reportedly said, McGregor flagged a Cyr Bus to continue south, but when the bus drove over the cable, it somehow became tangled in the bus, stretched and snapped.

McGregor, who was struck by the recoiling cable, suffered a broken back and broken eye sockets, and has to have surgery on his face and his left hand, according to his wife, Lisa McGregor, who also is a flagger and works for the same company as her husband.

“I met him at the hospital when the ambulance first brought him in, before he had any pain medication,” Lisa McGregor said. “The first thing he said to me is he did not wave the bus through.”

Larry McGregor is an experienced flagging supervisor, Brenda Malley of AB Malley Safety Equipment and Flagging said Friday.

“He’s good, he knows what he’s doing,” Malley said.

The bus driver said McGregor waved him through and told Cyr Bus Safety Coordinator Rick Vaillancourt that he never saw the cable in the road.

“We’re unclear exactly how or why [but] somehow the cable got tangled in the bus,” Vaillancourt said Friday.

He added that one of the linemen told him he had left the cable unattended on Ohio Street and was working on a utility pole on adjoining Finson Road when the accident occurred.

After the accident, the bus driver left the scene on foot and went back to an office a couple of hundred yards away to call for help.

Vaillancourt said he was unsure why the driver didn’t use the radio onboard the bus, but said at this point in the company’s investigation they haven’t found that the driver did anything wrong.

“He was just following the flagger’s directions,” Vaillancourt said.

But Lisa McGregor and Malley insist that Larry McGregor never would have directed the bus to drive over the steel cable.

“You never flag anything through when anything’s laying across the road,” Lisa McGregor said. “He wouldn’t ever have done that, no flagger would do that.”

When the cable snapped, “it flipped him up in the air and dropped him on his head,” she said. “You’re not going to let somebody go across anything laying in the road like that because of this. This is what can happen.”

She expects that her husband will be in the hospital for at least a couple more weeks and said she doesn’t think he’ll be able to go back to work this year, if at all.

“It’s just a hard hit,” she said.

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