Escape from Below
Milford Daily News
January 21, 1965
A Milford father of three narrowly escaped drowning this morning when a highway department tractor-type front-end loader he was using to clear snow from Hopedale Pond crashed through the ice into 12 feet of freezing water.
Trapped in the submerged vehicle, George R. Moore, 36, of 17 Dilla Street, who is employed by the Hopedale Highway Department, barely managed to escape by forcing open partially a sliding door on the cab.
The entire vehicle went under water, with only its uplifted power bucket and an exhaust pipe showing.
Ice on the pond had been measured as at least four inches thick before the snow scraping operation was sanctioned.
Moore scraped his back, and one leg as he squeezed through the narrow door opening. Holding his breath, he came up quickly, but his head struck solid ice as he reached the surface.
“God was on my side,” said Moore as he later described his plight to the Milford Daily News. “I reached up over my head with my left hand, and I found a hole. I poked my head up and crawled out on the ice,” he said.
Water froze on his garments and oozed from his shoes as he made his way over the ice to Hopedale Street where a passing motorist picked him up. Moore was reported in good condition at home this afternoon and said he might visit a doctor later in the day.
He was working alone and had driven out about 150 feet on the ice in the two-ton vehicle, starting from the beach area near the bathhouse.
The vehicle had plowed a bucket-wide strip of snow from the surface when Moore said ice on the left side “started to sink.
“I grabbed for the latch on the left side to get out, but all at once the other side gave way, and before I knew it I was in water over my head. I couldn’t breathe-the left door was jammed. I turned right and found the door there ajar and I pushed with all my strength to slide it, but couldn’t get it open all the way.
“There was just enough room for me to squeeze out. The water was freezing. I never thought I’d make it. I know now how it feels to be trapped.”
Moore said he “worked his way to the top,” and “then my head hit the ice.”
His lungs were bursting at this point, and in desperation he reached up wildly with his left arm and thrashed around the area until he found an opening in the ice. He rested, holding to the edge of the broken ice when he reached the surface when he surfaced and then managed to crawl onto the surface unaided. No one apparently witnessed the accident.
Moore said perhaps the ice was weakened by a channel that runs through the center of Hopedale Pond.
A few years ago, a smaller vehicle, a light truck, went partially through the ice during a similar clearing operation.
Moore is a former resident of Hopedale and with his family moved from 19 Progress Street in that town to Dilla Street in Milford last October.
His wife is the former Virginia Mann, and their three children are Kerry, 9; Cynthia, 7; and Barry, 4 ½.
Pulling the sunken unit out of the water poses a difficult problem. The vehicle is described as a Ford tractor, front-end loader, purchased by the Hopedale Highway Department about a year ago.
A skin diver may be needed to attach a wrecker cable to the submerged vehicle and ice leading to shore will have to be broken to create an open path to shore before the vehicle can be dragged out.
A similar accident happened in Framingham yesterday. A small truck plowing snow off of Dudley Pond broke through about 100 feet from shore. The driver escaped from the cab before the vehicle sank.
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