A small plane crashed into a transmission tower in Maryland on Sunday, knocking out electricity to roughly 117,000 customers as rescuers raced to extricate the two people on board who were trapped about 100 feet above the ground, the authorities said.
The pilot, Patrick Merkle, 65, of Washington, and the passenger, Jan Williams, 66, of Louisiana, were rescued after midnight with “serious injuries,” Chief Scott Goldstein of the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service said at a news conference. He added that they had been transported to a local trauma center and that fire crews would work to remove the plane and get the power lines reconnected.
The authorities had been in contact with the two people as the aircraft dangled in the power lines and tower. Chief Goldstein did not state the exact injuries of the two people, saying only that there had been a “hypothermia issue,” as well as orthopedic and trauma injuries from the crash.
The pilot and passenger had been flying to Montgomery County Airpark, an airport near Gaithersburg, Md., about 40 miles west of Baltimore, said Pete Piringer, a spokesman for the fire and rescue service. The Federal Aviation Administration said the plane, a single-engine Mooney M20J, had departed from Westchester County Airport in White Plains, N.Y., on Sunday.
It remained unclear what led to the crash, which happened in Montgomery Village, Md., around 5:40 p.m. and made for unusual photos by residents and officials on social media. The images and videos showed the plane entangled in power lines and seemingly suspended in the air in a snarled mess of metal.
By 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, officials had devised a rescue plan, Chief Goldstein said: First, crews would go up the tower and ensure the wires had no residual power. The crews would place cables on the wire and transfer any static electricity to a ground source, he said.
Another crew would then use bucket trucks — which are vehicles used to elevate workers — to access the aircraft, secure it to the tower and remove the pilot and the passenger, Chief Goldstein said.
“It’s not going to be stable until it’s chained and strapped in place,” Chief Goldstein said. “Any movement, any accidental movement, could make the circumstance worse.”
To make matters more difficult, dense fog in the area had worsened visibility during the seven-hour rescue operation, making things more slippery and dangerous, Chief Goldstein said.
By 10 p.m., bucket trucks had arrived at the scene and crews were preparing to embark on what officials expected to be a risky operation that would take hours. At one point, more than 100 fire and rescue workers were at the site.
“We are taking measured and risk-balanced steps to approach this,” Chief Goldstein said.
Pepco, the energy company in Maryland affected by the crash, said on Twitter that it was “awaiting clearance to the scene before crews can begin work to stabilize the electric infrastructure and begin restoring service.”
“Once the individuals have been rescued, we can focus all efforts on restoring power for our customers,” Pepco said. “We know it is difficult to be without power on this cold evening.”
In addition to the dangerous rescue operation, officials and residents had been contending with an adjacent problem: Wide swaths of the county, which has about one million residents, were without power for part of Sunday night, and officials were unsure how long restoration would take, given the extensive damage to the tower. By 1 a.m., power was restored in much of the county outside of the immediate area of the crash, Chief Goldstein said.
The Montgomery County Public School System said that because more than 40 of its schools and six office facilities were without power on Sunday night, it would cancel classes and close its offices on Monday. The county announced that Montgomery College would also close its campuses on Monday.
Two hospitals in the area, MedStar Montgomery Medical Center and Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, were briefly operating at limited capacity on Sunday because of the outages.
Mr. Piringer said there were reports of stalled elevators and malfunctioning traffic lights on Sunday night. Shortly before midnight, there were about 100 intersections with traffic signal outages, he said, a number he considered particularly dangerous because of the dense fog.
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