In Maryland on Sunday, a small plane collided with a transmission tower, cutting power to approximately 117,000 customers and sending rescuers into a frenzy as they attempted to free the two people on board who were stuck approximately 100 feet in the air, according to the authorities. The plane had two people on board.
Pete Piringer, a spokesman for the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service, said on Sunday that it appeared as though the pilot, Patrick Merkle, 65, of Washington, and the passenger, Jan Williams, 66, of Louisiana, were not seriously injured. Merkle is from Washington, and Williams is from Louisiana.
As the aeroplane hung precariously from the power lines and tower, he added that the authorities had been in communication with the two passengers inside. During a press conference held on Sunday evening, the chief of the county fire and rescue department, Scott Goldstein, said that authorities had instructed the pilot and the passenger to save battery life on their phones in order to connect with rescuers.
According to Mr. Piringer, the pilot and passenger were their route to Montgomery County Airpark, an airfield located close to Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is about 40 miles west of Baltimore. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the single-engine Mooney M20 aircraft took off from Westchester County Airport in White Plains, New York, on Sunday. The airport is located in Westchester County.
It was not apparent what caused the incident, which took place at around 5:40 p.m. in Montgomery Village, Maryland, and resulted in odd photographs being posted on social media by local residents and government authorities. The photographs and videos showed the aircraft caught in the wires of the power lines and seemed to be floating through the air in a tangled mass of metal.
Chief Goldstein said that a rescue plan had been developed by the authorities by 9:30 p.m. on Sunday evening. First, personnel will ascend up the tower and confirm that the cables do not contain any residual electricity. According to him, the personnel are going to attach cables on the line in order to transmit any static charge to a ground source.
According to Chief Goldstein, a different team will next employ bucket trucks, which are vehicles that lift personnel, or a “extraordinarily massive crane” to get access to the aircraft, attach it to the tower, and remove the pilot and the passenger.
Chief Goldstein said that the structure would not be secure until it was chained and secured into position. “Any movement, even an inadvertent movement, might potentially make the situation much more dire.”
Chief Goldstein said that the strong fog that was present in the region was reducing vision and would “make things more wet and slippery.” This added to the already challenging situation.
At ten o’clock in the evening, bucket trucks had arrived at the area, and employees were getting ready to begin what authorities anticipated would be a dangerous operation that would take many hours to complete. There were more than one hundred people working in fire and rescue at the scene at one time.
Chief Goldstein said that in order to handle this situation, “we are taking deliberate and risk-balanced approaches.”
Pepco, the electricity company in Maryland that was impacted by the collision, said on its Twitter account that it was “awaiting clearance to the site” before personnel could begin work to stabilise the electric infrastructure and begin restoring power.
In addition to the risky rescue effort, authorities and people had to deal with another issue that was nearby: As of Sunday night, large portions of the county, which is home to around one million people, continued to be without power, and county authorities were unclear how long it would take to restore service given the massive damage sustained by the tower.
Because more than 40 of its schools and six of its administrative buildings remained without power on Sunday night, the Montgomery County Public School System has announced that it is considering suspending classes for Monday as a result. According to Chief Goldstein, the outages caused two hospitals in the region, the MedStar Montgomery Medical Center and the Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, to operate at a capacity that was below their normal levels on Sunday.
According to Mr. Piringer, there were already complaints of elevators that had stopped working and traffic lights that were malfunctioning on Sunday night.
