The 40-foot wall of sand and clay where a portion of Route 136 collapsed Thursday is so unstable that the motor of a crane that plunged from the road to the river is still running.The operator of the crane left the motor idling when he scrambled out of the cab of the rig after it plunged four stories from the road level down to the edge of the Androscoggin River. Both the crane operator and a welder standing nearby operating a pile-driver hammer, who also rode the avalanche to the bottom, escaped injury. That was Thursday. On Friday, engineers were still scratching their heads over the collapsed road. No one dared go near the crane’s cab to switch the key to the off position. “It’s a big problem,” said John Linscott, co-owner of H.B. Fleming Co. of South Portland, which owns the crane. “The ground is so unstable that it’s almost unsafe to even go and take a picture of it.”
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