CHINA — A town man is facing misdemeanor charges after he got a truck stuck on an all-terrain vehicle trail and allegedly destroyed a bridge early Sunday morning.
The bridge is owned by China Four Seasons Club, whose president says it has struggled this summer with damage caused by people driving passenger vehicles on their trails, which cross private land.
Tyonek Thurlow, 26, is charged in the incident just off state Route 9, which was reported by a nearby resident on Parmenter Terrace at 2:28 p.m., according to Warden Steve Allarie of the Maine Warden Service. He said wardens found an unregistered and uninsured full-size Chevrolet truck half-off of the damaged ATV bridge with Thurlow and a male passenger asleep in the back seat.
“They had no phone coverage, so I guess they decided that’d be an appropriate thing to do,” Allarie said.
The driver apparently had attempted to cross the narrow bridge and the truck broke through.
Thurlow was summoned on misdemeanor charges of criminal mischief and attaching false plates, Allarie said. Thurlow is also facing a civil violation for operating the truck on an ATV trail. The passenger wasn’t charged. Allarie said there could be more charges because of the damage to the bridge, which Frank Soares, president of China Four Seasons Club, said could cost $5,000 to fix.
On Sunday, club members brought equipment into the trail to help wardens pull the truck out. They also made the bridge passable, but Soares said it was destroyed and will have to be replaced by winter, when snowmobiles will need it. The China ATV club struggled with a downturn in membership last year, but Soares said membership has nearly doubled since a Morning Sentinel article highlighting the problem.
Since then, he said the club has been aggressively improving their trails, which are built to accommodate vehicles no more than 62 inches wide. But Soares said the trails have been damaged by passenger vehicles on the last five weekends. While he said club members think they know who causes much of the damage, they usually leave the trails before they’re caught.
“Guys like this, we just can’t keep up with them,” Soares said. “We build it up and they destroy it.”
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