A pair of landslides in Alna brought down a large embankment and blocked Donna Wallace’s driveway on June 15. Local contractor and Alna Road Commissioner Jeff Verney was working Sunday afternoon to clear Wallace’s driveway, located off Route 218.

Verney estimated that at least 400 yards of earth came down, something he’d seen upcountry but never around Alna, until Sunday.

Asked how much the fallen earth might weigh, Verney said from the excavator’s seat, “I don’t know. It’s heavy.”

No one was hurt in the slides, one of which Wallace said occurred around midnight Saturday night. The former Alna town clerk slept through that one, inside her mobile home; but a neighbor later told her he heard that first slide and thought it was a thunderstorm. In the morning, she found her driveway partly blocked. “My whole body started shaking,” she said.

Wallace, along with a friend she had called, and others on hand witnessed the second slide, around 8 a.m. At the time, they were further down the driveway, looking to see if more earth might come loose.

“While we were over there checking out that by the trailer ... the rest of the banking fell, and it was like a great big thunder and the ground shook and everything. It was scary,” Wallace said.

“Mother Nature did her thing.”

Wallace said she called Central Maine Power because it has some lines near a pine tree, which remained standing at the much-pared top of the embankment.

Wallace said a lot of what gave way in the slides was blue clay, which she said does not appear to be in the remaining embankment closest to her home. That appears to be gravel, she said.

“The force of all that rain was too much for the clay,” Wallace said. During the day on Saturday, a lot of water was coming from the embankment, she said. “It was like a river.”

The area received between two and two-and-a-half inches of rain, mostly on Friday, June 13, said meteorologists at the National Weather Service’s Gray office. The Sheepscot River near Alna’s Head Tide Dam was running fast and brown on Saturday, June 14. Meteorologist Mike Kistner attributed the coloring to runoff due to the heavy rainfall.

Meteorologist Jim Brown later said he had heard of no other incidents of landslides following the latest rainfall. The next round of rain was expected to arrive Wednesday, June 18, he said.

Wallace said she would be watching for more erosion near that pine tree, and the utility lines, but other than that, she said, she will not be concerned when it rains from now on. “It doesn’t bother me, as far as the future, because what nature’s going to do, is (what) nature’s going to do.”