Presque Isle Historical Society: Plane Crashes in the County

PRESQUE ISLE, Maine (WAGM) -There have been several plane crashes in the County over the last 100 years. In fact, there are actually debris fields still in the county from some of these crashes. It’s the focus of this months topic with the Presque Isle Historical Society.

Kim Smith, Secretary and treasurer for the Presque Isle Historical Society says, “There were a lot of aviation plane crashes in this area. Primarily because of the military facility that we had here. There is a fabulous website out there called Maine wreck chasers and if you go on that site, you can look up all the military aviation crashes in the state of Maine, find out the date, what type of aircraft, what the cause of the crash was, what the disposition of the aircraft was, who the crew was on board. And there are over 800 military crashes during that time period throughout the state of Maine. Of those, and I think it’s like 818, of those, over a hundred have to do specifically with the base here at Presque Isle. Out of those 105, I think it is, there were 18 with fatalities and some of them still have debris fields on the ground. You can actually go and find them and find the debris. This is the website, Maine wreck chasers and it runs from 1919 to 1989 and when you start looking at it, what I have done is I have highlighted any that had to do with Presque Isle. I’ve put a plus mark in front of those with fatalities and a check mark in front of those with debris still on the ground.”

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