T-W-O D-W-I

Last night was busy for New Paltz police, EMTs, and firefighters. Roads were wet or iced over in places, and so were some of the drivers.

At 11, a fire call came in from SUNY campus. It was just a false alarm, and I was back by 11:30. No sooner had I stepped into the house than another call came in, this one for a car accident with downed power lines not far from home. I drove there and parked far enough away from the crash that my car didn't get in the way. A young man driving his truck had spun off the road, smashing into a power line before coming to rest in some trees, perpendicular to the road. According to the cop on the scene, a friend of mine, the guy claimed the accident was due to ice, but all of us could tell that this was not true: There was no ice on the road. My pal, Fireman Fred, had this great response: "Oh, his accident was caused by ice, all right -- Molson Ice!"

We closed off the road in one direction while waiting for Central Hudson to arrive. One of the power lines was on the ground but was not 'live,' so the CH man rolled it up and put it out of the way so that the tow truck operator could get at the truck. Meanwhile the driver was taken off to the police station. His totalled truck was impounded. Apparently CH charges $2000 per hour for their time and $2000 for the new utility pole, so the driver is going to have a lot of bills to worry about in addition to his DWI charge. It turns out that while we were taking care of this call, another driver was getting booked for a DWI accident a few miles away.

I got home at 1 and should have gone right to bed, but I was a bit wound up, but first I played a few games of online Scrabble, winning most of them (a sign that I still had my wits about me). Finally I went to bed at around 2am. 40 minutes later, another call came in, this time for a truck that had crashed due to icy conditions. The dispatcher warned that the tarmack near the accident was extremely slick, so I drove there about half as fast as the speed limits for the road. Again I parked out of the way, and as soon as I stepped out of my car, I could tell what caused the mishap: I nearly fell on the icy pavement. It turns out that one of the chiefs did fall down, hurting his back and gashing a finger, but he stayed on the scene. The driver of this truck was drunk, too, but the accident was definitely caused more by the road than by his inebriation; unfortunately for him, he still got charged with DWI. As was the case with the earlier accident, his truck looked fine until the tow truck removed it from the trees, and again, this car was undriveable and would be considered 'totalled.' The difference was that this driver was hurt, possibly more by the airbag than by the crash, or maybe his head injuries were from hitting the driver's side window. He left in an ambulance. We cleared the road of some ice and debris and headed home at about 3:45 am. As I left the accident, I passed a New Paltz sanding truck on its way to making that road safer.

I didn't expect to get much sleep, and just before 8 this morning, I got a wakeup shout from Maeve. We went downstairs for brekky, but before I'd even started my tea, a call came in for a possible fire. Since I have yet to see a fire, I was intrigued by the possibility of a structure fire, and since the address given was on 32N, I drove right there. It was, happily, a false alarm called in by a neighbor who was concerned about the steam coming off a house across the road from hers; the steam did look like smoke, but it was only a case on condensation. Back at the fire house, we the assembled firefighters washed off all of the trucks, and I was back home by 9 with some Starbucks treats for the family.