It’s scary to watch the boat and trailer you’re towing pull up alongside you.

It’s also scary to have them careening toward you, out of control.

Just ask Luke Marquardt and Kelly Mitchell.

Marquardt and Joe Ogborn towed Marquardt’s 21-foot Bayliner “Kirin” across town Monday at around noon.

Ogborn and Marquardt were in the cab of a pickup pulling the boat. They were traveling southbound on Second Avenue and had just descended the hill by the bank when the trailer became detached. They noticed it out their passenger-side window as it drew beside them.

“It was frightening. It could have killed somebody or gone through the building,” Marquardt said afterwards, surveying damage to a flagpole at Willard Street and Second.

Specifically, the loaded trailer could have struck Mitchell, a resident who had just crossed Second Avenue at Willard when she heard a loud scraping sound and looked up. The trailer was heading toward her, at a distance of about 10-15 feet.

“I was totally in its trajectory,” Mitchell said. “It was really close.” For reasons she can’t explain, she pointed at it. “It started to pass the (pickup) truck. That’s when I said to myself, ‘Oh, run.’”

As the trailer left the roadway, its front, right-side tire squarely hit an I-beam sunk in concrete at the base of the flagpole, apparently stopping the boat’s momentum abruptly.

By then the tongue of the trailer had broken some balusters of a handrail at Uniquely Alaskan Gifts. It came to a rest about four feet short of the building. The flagpole bent over but stopped a few feet shy of hitting the gift shop’s roof.

Surveying the scene, including a bent flagpole and a bent trailer axle but only scratches to the boat and pickup truck and no damage to the gift shop, Marquardt said, “I guess I’m lucky and unlucky in the same package.”

Ogborn was at the wheel of the truck and the two were moving the boat from Second Avenue Auto to near the Haines Quick Shop, Marquardt said.

Marquardt said he believed that the trailer’s safety chain – intended to keep a trailer and vehicle connected if a ball-hitch fails – was fastened at the time of the accident.

Pedestrian Mitchell described the circumstances of the accident as uncanny.

“It missed all the pedestrians. It was going to keep going down the sidewalk then it stopped squarely on a piece of metal that had no reason to be there,” she said.

The accident is not unlike others that have befallen businesses located at the bottom of local hills. At the other end of the block from the accident site, The Parts Place was hit by vehicles three times over the course of about 20 years – including once by a driverless pickup truck that came through its north-facing wall.

The municipality eventually put a cement barricade on the sidewalk there.

“When the building was the post office, it was hit numerous times, also,” parts clerk Tyler Scovill said this week.