Returning to your car only to find it gone is bad enough. It’s even worse when it’s your fire truck. That’s exactly what happened to Everett, Washington, firefighters late Friday night after returning from a medical call, reports ABC News. At about 11:00 pm, the first 911 call came in reporting that a fire truck had crashed into two parked cars and fled. This was around the same time the truck was discovered missing.
Soon after, a second call reported the truck smashing about 10 vehicles. Police found three additional crash sites while responding to the two that had been reported to 911. At least 14 cars were damaged in total, with ABC News reporting at least 16 confirmed. The driver and apparent thief of the truck, whose identity remains unknown, abandoned the truck, fled the scene on foot, and remains at large.
The fire truck in question is a 2018 Pierce Enforcer Pumper, according to the Everett Fire Department’s Facebook post. It’s one of the newer vehicles in the fleet and weighs over 35,000 pounds, making it a significant hazard in the hands of a driver not trained to drive a vehicle that heavy. It’s far from the world’s biggest fire truck, but it’s well beyond the 26,000-pound limit of a standard non-commercial driver’s license. From my personal “Grand Theft Auto” gameplay, I’ve learned that fire trucks are large, lumbering beasts that are difficult to control, but that steerable water cannon on the roof is pretty cool.
How did this happen?
We certainly wouldn’t leave the engine running while walking away from our cars, so why would firefighters? Everett Fire Public Information Officer Rachel Doniger told Fox 13 that the light bars, sirens, and other equipment draw a lot of electrical power from the batteries, and the engine must remain running to power them. This makes sense – even I once needed a jump start after a day of running my ham radio while working a rally stage, and I wasn’t running a dazzling display of emergency lights like a fire truck does. Pumper trucks often have generators to supply additional power, but they would not have been running one during a medical call when it wasn’t needed. Doniger said she did not know if the doors were locked or not, but the department will be reviewing its policies over locking doors and running engines.
Photos on Facebook show some of the casualties of the rampage. AÂ bright yellow Camaro has damage all down the driver’s side, with the driver door skin completely ripped off. It belonged to John Wahleithner, who needed it to get to an upcoming surgery appointment. A nearby Honda Civic’s entire trunk section is gone. One of the saddest victims is a classic Chevy pickup truck that appears to have been in great condition until the front and back got smashed in. Joseph Latshaw told Fox 13 he’d owned it for 35 years.
