Sunday, July 20, 2008

BREAKING NEWS: Casco Bay Bridge Activity

A slew of siren-laden vehicles rushed past our apartment this evening, just after 8:00pm. When they didn't let up, and fire trucks joined the police cars in the parade, we thought we'd see what was up.

We encountered the logjam of emergency vehicles at the intersection of Danforth and State Streets here in Portland, where they had the street blocked off down to where State and York Streets join at the base of the hill. Some of the fire trucks were departing, but several police and EMT vehicles remained on the lower part of the street. A few Portland Police Department cars suddenly appeared, heading across the Casco Bay Bridge, and we drove across in their wake.

Just past the control booth at the halfway point on the bridge, we saw a woman in a hot pink jogging suit jacket on the opposite side of the walkway than one expects to see people. She was hanging onto the wall with one arm as we drove past, and officers were approaching her on foot from their cars. (Let us also mention the High Weirdness of seeing a dark SUV pulled over on the southbound side of the bridge with the vanity plate "FNORD"!) On reaching the South Portland side of the bridge, we drove out through the marina to see if we could spot what was going on out over the water.

We were just in time to catch these shots, as officers, after joining her on the water side of the walkway wall, apparently convinced her to return to the land of the living. In this sequence of shots, you can identify the unknown person by her bright pink jacket, as she climbs back over the wall. Please click on the photo for a larger image.Since none of the news channels is on top of this story, we have no idea what happened. Conjecture is almost useless, but we wonder if someone who was involved with whatever happened on State Street ran from the scene in an effort to either escape, do away with themselves, or distract attention from the original scene. The coincidence of these two incidents occurring within clear walking distance from each other and almost simultaneously implies a connection. But what do we know? Just what we glimpse.

All photos by Michelle Souliere, (c)2008

2 comments:

Maine said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Kidbilly said...

I'm not at all surprised that the news didn't cover this. The Portland news seems to be very selective in what they do cover. Last month when Steven Ricci was released from jail and promised police he would rape and mutilate a woman, only one news channel covered it and it was EXCLUSIVE to them. This is the type of story that every single resident of Portland should have known about, but because one channel had it exclusive, it was up to the public to pass the information on. Just crazy. Yet, some of the smallest and most useless information seems to always end up on our local broadcasts. Like our newscasters need to repeat Hollywood Gosspip, but they do anyway.