MAINE – As spring sets animals in the roadway are on the rise, in Maine that can be a 1,500 pound moose. Thats what happened when a Maine State Trooper was responding to a call on May 13th.
According to the Maine State Police social media post Tr. Castonguay was responding to a call last night when a moose entered the roadway in front of him on the Interstate in Island Falls. Tr. Castonguay was unable to avoid the moose and struck it, luckily he was able to avoid serious injuries.
More than 500 traffic crashes involving moose occur in northern New England each year, and the injuries sustained by a vehicle’s occupants—because of the height and weight of the animal—can be far more serious and more likely to result in fatalities than collisions with deer.
In Maine alone, the study documented 50,281 collisions with deer and 7,062 with moose from 2003 to 2017. Twenty-six moose collisions resulted in a human fatality, as did 10 deer collisions—an incidence of one in 271 crashes (0.37 percent) for the former compared with one in 5,000 (0.02 percent) for the latter. “Deer collisions are indeed much more common, but after controlling for other factors, our statistical model demonstrated that a human fatality was more than 13 times as likely after collision with a moose,” Dr. Clark said.
Moose are massive animals, weighing from 800 to 1,300 pounds and standing as tall as 6 feet, 6 inches at the shoulder. When the front of a vehicle strikes a moose, it tends to impact its long legs, sending the bulk of the animal to collide into the windshield and roof.
Moose crashes are on the rise, as spring is here and the warmer weather sets in. Please be extra cautious in your travels and watch for moose, deer and other animals as they can be very difficult to see and very unpredictable.
