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.

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