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An admittedly awful quality clip of Detroit’s Ladder 13 missing a turn on the way to a fire call (we will work on finding better). The driver told a reporter the front brakes locked up. No one was hurt.
Here are excerpts from a story by Taryn Asher at WJBK-TV:
It happened at the corner of Lawndale and Vernor on the city’s southwest side. Two people suffered minor injuries.
Bobby Cox heard the sirens and saw the lights. He immediately pulled over on Vernor, looked up and saw a Detroit Fire ladder truck heading straight toward him.
“I was just praying that he didn’t hit me,” Cox said. “He come barreling around the corner and just slid right into the back of me. Then he went out of control and hit that car over there.”
Click here for Google Map Street View of intersection where crash occurred.
The Detroit Fire truck was responding to an alarm on Lawndale. The driver of the big rig told FOX 2 off camera that his front brakes locked and that forced him to crash into a Chevy Impala and then slam into a Pontiac G6.
Witnesses tell a different story and surveillance video taken from the Dollar Max store seems to back their claims. “I think he’s a crazy driver,” said Basam Safadi, who owns the Dollar Max store.
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I thought that Engine was moving. but that Truck. Holy Crap!..
And he still tried to make that turn. Such an idiot.. Why not go to the next block.
Lucky no one was killed.
Damn
Talk about too much speed… wonder what the officer was saying to the driver…
Totaly out of control in my eyes..
Sure the brakes locked up too bad we can't see tire smoke.
So lucky no one was killed.
First off….I don't believe any brakes locked up. Even if they did, the truck was being driven WAY TOO FAST. When are our apparatus drivers going to understand, these pieces are too big to drive recklessly. SLOW DOWN before someone is killed.
In the beginning of the clip looks like there was car hit 1st, then the impala and then the G6. Hope we can get a better view. But seems like there could be a 3rd car, which would have actually been the 1st car struck.
It could have been a brake problem. With the economy in the tank (plus Detroit's being in the tank for years) some maintenance is just deferred until money is available. I have seen what would cost $500 to repair deferred until the piece couldn't be used anymore and it cost several thousand to repair.
There was a big report a few years ago about how Detroit's FD is very poorly funded, and one of the big issues was the lack of vehicle maintenance. Since Detroit isn't in any better financial shape, it wouldn't surprise me to see if this rig has had little to no maintenance done on it.
There's no way that clip was in real time. It had to have been sped up some. People seen walking were moving kind of fast.
The video is sped up – there is no way people park their cars that quickly. watch it again
Uhhh did we forget where we were going????.
It doesn't matter that the video is at a high speed….it could be in super-slo-mo…..the fact is the apparatus was being driven too FAST!!!!!
Look at the new video with better definition – it looks like cross traffic had the green light and the truck had a red light.