Saw this at a roadside rest stop day before yesterday. Through random happenstance, I was on the scene before the police or other emergency personnel; fortunately the driver, the sole occupant, was standing some distance away, unharmed and on the phone to someone. I can proudly say that I was relieved to find that I didn’t have to make the decision of whether or not to try to pull someone out of that.
Someone else there on the scene in an RV mentioned, rather hesitantly, that she had a fire extinguisher. My point of view was based on two points:
- There are no humans or critters at risk
- That truck is, at that point, trashed.
A fire extinguisher would be unlikely to put out *that* fire (the truck driver told me that he had *just* filled the tank, so there were a whole lot of gallons of gas in it), and would stand a good chance of endangering the person wielding it. At best, you’d turn an “utterly ruined” truck into a “pretty much utterly ruined” truck. When the police arrived, their response was the same… cordon it off, let ’em burn until the actual firefighters showed up.
Until I found that the sole occupant was fine and standing *over* *there,* I had that uncomfortable feeling of “this is *really* gonna hurt” as I pondered the possible need of pulling someone out of that. Fortunately, sometimes the only real solution available is to do nothing., and this was one of those times.
Just a few days before that, I knuckled under and bought one of those $40 dashcams from Wal Mart. It records videos in 3 minute chunks, immediately starting a new file after the end of the previous one. When the memory card is full it deletes the oldest file and starts a new one, thus keeping a constant “loop” of video. Once I pulled away from the scene I decided to back up the relevant clips from the dashcam; there were four or five that covered the incident from the time I first saw smoke until I pulled away. The first video ends just as I pull into the rest stop. The second video, with the bulk of the “action,” such as it was… is corrupted and won’t play. *Of* course.