Many years ago I drove my truck an camper to Roosevelt Lake for the annual AiResearch fishing derby. Long story short we had a good time drank a lot of beer an did very little fishing. Our children were very young at the time but I know they had a pretty good time. The problem was that I had a defective muffler on the truck a rusted out hole while not very large it was on the top of the muffler. Normally this would not be a big problem but the old chevy truck had a wooden bed. To compound the problem an actually cause the fire I had a qt of motor oil stored in the cubby hole between the camper an the bed and it had broke open an leaked onto the wood bed of the truck right over where the hot gases hit the wood bed from the defective muffler.Perfect Storm is what you call this series of gremlin activity. I was driving back an had my buddy "Rich" from work an my 3 year old daughter in the cab of the truck. I thank God that I didn't have any one in the camper driving back. We were driving back through Apache Junction when I noticed I could not see behind me in the rear view mirror as I was driving,normally the rear window of the truck lined up with the camper front window and rear door of the camper so you could see behind you while driving. This was due to the camper filling up with smoke since the bed an the bottom side of the camper had caught on fire. Just about the time my brain was putting this all together a motorist pulled up along side the truck beeping his horn an yelling fire. I couldn't here him but lip reading FIRE is not hard. I pulled over an Rich my work friend grabbed my daughter Samantha an I yelled at him to keep Samantha away from the truck because the fire was on the driver side of the truck an a propane bottle for the camper was on that side an I feared it would blow. I had a fire extinguisher which I grabbed an quickly open an touched the propane tank which was still cool to the touch not hot an ran back to open the rear door.Bad idea since the door knob on the camper was hot enough to give me second degree burns on my hand. someone handed me some rags or their shirt which ignoring the pain in my hand I used to open the door standing off to the side since I had some training from the military fighting fires an knew it could blow out when I opened the door. Soon as I could, I used my fire extinguisher to get about half the fire in the camper out,luckily someone had 2 five gallon bottles of water which we used to put the rest of the camper an truck bed fire out. The only problem left was at least half a dozen of field fires behind us which sparks an pieces of the bed on fire had dropped off as we drove down the road and caught quite a bit of Apache Junction fields on fire with at least a dozen fire trucks an emergency vehicles were in the process of getting put out. It looked like Armageddon an all consuming war with all the fields on fire an by the time I saw this the second degree burns on my right hand were really starting to hurt since the adrenaline rush was wearing off from fighting the fire. So off to emergency for me to get treatment for my burns an the Arizona DPS took my truck to find out what caused the fire. few days later it came back as an accident an as luck would have it I was the only person who had injuries an property damage. They ruled it an accident and that ends the tale of the day I "accidentally" tried to burn down the town of Apache Junction which in the 1970's was not a very big town. Luckily all the fields needed the excess brush burned off although that really was not something I wanted any part of.
No comments:
Post a Comment