5/26/25
Hartland, VT — A teenage farmhand sustained “substantial to serious” injuries Monday afternoon after he lost control of a large piece of farm machinery on a downhill stretch of Route 5 and plunged at least a hundred feet down a steep embankment into a rocky gorge.
Off-duty Hartford Fire Captain Shawn Hannux, a paramedic who lives in Hartland, happened to be following directly behind the nearly 27-ton vehicle when he saw it try to make room for a car coming uphill before striking a retaining wall on its righthand side.
The large John Deere Forage Harvester, also known as a “self propelled chopper,” then veered sharply to the left across both narrow lanes on the curving section of Route 5, which lies just past the tall waterfall that drops into the Lulls Brook Gorge between Hartland Three Corners and the area off I-91’s Exit 9.
“I’ve been on the fire department for 18 years and this was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen happening,” Hannux recalled at the scene. “He met a car and I think he tried to get over to the side, but he popped the retaining wall and it just sent him over.”
The large machine, which is used to cut hay, rolled straight over a section of guardrail and sliced through a power pole, knocking out electricity to much of the immediate area, as it went over the edge.
The 53,000 pound John Deere self-propelled “chopper” crashed headfirst down a steep embankment, ejecting the teenage driver onto the rocky bottom of the Lulls Brook Gorge near the base of a tall waterfall. All images © Eric Francis.
About halfway down the embankment the machine struck a large-diameter water pipe that diverts some of the flow of the Lulls Brook around the nearby waterfall and down to a small hydroelectric station at the base of the gorge.
Hannux and other passersby who happened to be on the road at 3 p.m. on Memorial Day Monday stopped their cars and rushed down the slippery slope to help 19-year-old Joseph Ferris of Braintree, who was ejected from the cab of the vehicle when it jumped up over the pipe and finally slammed into the rocky creek bed at the bottom.
One of them, Chris Rowe, who lives just up the road from the scene, said that even though Ferris had been “flung out of the vehicle, he was conscious and talking, but he was in a lot of pain.”
“Just by luck there was a paramedic on scene first,” Rowe noted, adding that other farm workers, including Ferris’ father, were there in a matter of moments because they had all been traveling from Braintree to hay a field alongside Route 5.
Hartland volunteer firefighters worked with firefighters from Windsor and Hartford Fire’s technical Rescue From Heights Team to pull the victim about a hundred feet back up onto Route 5 using ropes and a Stokes basket.
Hartland Assistant Fire Chief Scott Bowers said that despite the distance down and the large pipe obstacle just above the wreckage of the totaled forager, crews from the Hartland, Windsor, and Hartford fire departments were able to quickly deploy ropes over the embankment and pull Ferris up with the aid of a Stokes wire metal rescue basket.
“We brought him up underneath the pipe just because of the way it is,” Bowers explained. “If you (tried to) go over the pipe it would be straight down.”
Friends at the scene said despite Ferris’s young age he is experienced at operating farm equipment and they noted he had driven clear down from Braintree with the vehicle on Monday and was just minutes from reaching the field the party was intending to hay.
He was transported to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, where he was being treated for what state police on Monday evening described as “moderately substantial to serious injuries.”
A view up the steep embankment of the snapped-off base of the power pole which left electricity knocked out to much of the area.