Johannes Plenio for Unsplash
A Dallas fire truck got into an accident and crashed near the White Rock Lake spillway Wednesday. Only one person, an East Dallas driver at the wrong place, wrong time, was injured. The house fire the engine was responding to was extinguished without delay or injury.
The fire engine had its lights and siren on at about 11:15 Wednesday when it hydroplaned on the wet road, lost control near San Rafael Drive and crashed into a car before coming to a stop in the grass near the White Rock Lake spillway.
The person in the other vehicle was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. No one else was hurt. The fire engine sustained significant damage and was towed away from the lake Wednesday afternoon, Dallas Fire Rescue spokesman Jason Evans says.
Wednesday was a busy day for first responders, as heavy storms blew through our neighborhood.
The Advocate earlier in the day reported that at about 11 a.m. a home on Gaston was hit by lightning. The crashed fire truck was en route to that incident, Evans confirms. He says the flames at the Gaston home were extinguished just after 12:30 p.m. and no injuries were reported in association with that fire.
There were no delays in extinguishing this fire, Evans says.
“When a unit has an accident, or something else that results in their inability to respond, they are automatically replaced with the next closest available unit. Not to mention, the initial response to a structure fire consists of three engines, two trucks and a battalion chief, so it’s not like the engine that crashed was the only unit going to the fire.”
Despite the accident, the first unit arrived at this fire in less than two minutes.
