The situation seemed grim: a family of 10 from Michigan stranded at 1:30 in the morning at the start of a holiday weekend, their rented van wrecked and no place to go. Thanks to some quick thinking by the Antrim first responders turned a near-catastrophe right around.
Fire Chief Marshall Gale was the first to respond to the call in the wee hours of Saturday morning.
He discovered a “fairly heavy duty” passenger van had crashed on the side of Route 9 near Clinton Road, taking out a long section of guard rail. There were no injuries among the van’s 10 occupants, a family of Ugandan immigrants who had been traveling from their home in Michigan to Concord to celebrate a newborn in the family. “They had been driving for quite some time,” Gale said, as he and the family members worked to overcome language barriers to piece together the situation.
“Finding them a place to stay or another rental vehicle was going to be problematic,” Gale said, in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend, when responding police officers John Blake and Leland Hunter suggested using the town’s community bus. Antrim has owned a community bus since the 1980s, Gale estimated, most frequently used for transporting senior citizens on trips to the mall and special events.
The following hour and a half was a flurry as Gale and Blake got keys from Town Hall, collected the community van from the highway department, and took the family’s substantial cache of belongings along in a pickup truck. Blake drove the family to their Concord destination in the town’s bus. Gale described the whole endeavor as “kind of an interesting night.”
“We’re thankful that nobody got injured and we were able to utilize the resources in town to get them where they needed to go,” Hunter said. “The guardrail can always be replaced.”