Stuckage contest winner yet to be announced
by Guy Page
Thanks to a Florida truck driver who followed his GPS and ignored signs and bystanders, there’s a winner in the Stowe Rotary Club Stuckage contest.
At 8 pm Sunday night July 2, the Vermont State Police responded to the “Notch” in Cambridge for a tractor trailer that got stuck.
State police identified the operator as Yusnier Anuez, 36, of Florida City, Florida. Anuez advised he ignored several signs that are posted stating tractor trailers are prohibited, as he was following his GPS.
Multiple bystanders attempted to stop Anuez from entering the Notch, however he continued. The road was closed for several hours until Charlebois Towing removed the truck and trailer. Anuez was issued to tickets carrying a combined monetary fine of $3,544.
The Stuckage contest winner has not yet been named. When in March it announced the “guess the date” contest, similar to lake and pond ice-out contests across Vermont, Stowe Rotary provided the explanation and background (below).
The Vermont Agency of Transportation has an internal word for when a tractor-trailer wedges itself on the windy mountain road between Stowe and Jeffersonville: a “stuckage.”
And while they’re working on a handful of ways to prevent stuck trucks, it remains a persistent, vaguely goofy, problem. Earlier last summer, not too long after the Notch road reopened from its annual winter hibernation, two trucks got stuck in the Notch in less than two weeks.
From 2009 to 2021, an average of 8.6 trucks have gotten stuck in the Notch each year, according to data from the Vermont Agency of Transportation. That number has decreased in recent years, with only five stuckages in 2021.