A small plane crashed into a power line pole in Maryland over the holiday weekend, injuring two people and leaving nearby residents without power, officials said.
A single-engine plane crashed entangled in the towerhappened about 25 miles northwest of Washington, D.C., shortly after sunset on Nov. 27, according to a Maryland State Police news release.
The plane was trapped 100 feet off the groundthe Montgomery County Career Firefighters Association said in a statement.
According to state police, the only two passengers were a male pilot from Washington, D.C., and a passenger from Louisiana. Both are 66 years old.
The couple, who had been hanging in the air for hours, were rescued around midnight by emergency medical personnel operating a crane truck, police said. Once safely on the ground, they were taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.
Multiple agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the Maryland State Police, are investigating the incident, police said. There are no signs of criminal activity.
As a result of the collision, power lines were damaged, which led to the outage of approx 85 thousand peopleaccording to the statement of the utility company Pepco dated November 27.
Montgomery County Public Schools said it is schools would be closed due to outages, according to NBC Washington.
By the early morning of Monday, November 28, power was restored to all those affected by the collision, according to Pepco.
Although plane crashes are rare, they are much more likely to happen non-commercial aircraft.
“Over the past 20 years, charter and private jets are significantly more likely to crash than commercial airliners, 9.4 times and 32.9 times, respectively,” according to a Harvard University Risk Management study.
Over the past year, there have been several collisions of small planes with power lines, including one in New Hampshire and one in California resulting in four deaths.