N.Y. Fire Truck Gets 'Beached' on Resident's Front Lawn
Source Times Union, Albany, N.Y.
March 09--NISKAYUNA -- My bad.
A section of Rosendale Road was closed for more than an hour Friday morning after a fire engine returning from the repair shop to Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory veered off the road and became wedged on a guardrail in Allison Eastman's front yard.
No one was injured, but it took two heavy-duty tow trucks to winch the beached pumper truck from the edge of the asphalt, where it sat tipped at a 45-degree angle after the 8:30 a.m. mishap.
"My son heard it and we looked out the window and there was a fire truck in our yard," Eastman, who's lived in her white house just off Rosendale, where the road takes a sharp left after descending a steep hill, since 1986.
Three days after she moved in, she said, a car slammed into the telephone pole in her front yard.
"It's a bad spot. People don't slow down coming down the hill," said Eastman, recalling other crashes. "It's become commonplace. Although we've never had a fire truck in our front yard."
Eugene Terwilliger, a spokesman for the River Road lab run by the Bechtel Marine Propulsion Corp. for the U.S. Department of Energy, said the crash happened when a teamster returning the truck from the shop misjudged the roadway.
The fire engine is a part of the lab's 24-hour on-site fire department.
"We'll work with Niskayuna police, obviously, and conduct a thorough investigation," Terwilliger said.
In the meantime, he said, the truck will be back in the shop.
[email protected] --518-454-5445 --@JCEvangelist_TU
Copyright 2012 - Times Union, Albany, N.Y.
