This morning we set out from Washington, D.C. for the final leg of our long trip, heading for my sister’s house in New Hope, PA, but first we had to drop our trailer off at a storage yard I had located in nearby Frenchtown, NJ, about 20 miles away.
Our drive was easy. Last night we prepped, flushing the tanks, taking out trash, packing up clothing, and doing as many other chores as we could to ready the trailer for storage. The weather was perfect for travel, the truck is running well, and we were excited to finally arrive, spend time with family, and live indoors again.
My only trepidation was routing – the roads near the river tend to be narrow, winding, and they often cut through villages and towns designed more for horses and carts than the nearly 50 feet and 6 tons of steel on four axles we were hauling around. Most of all, I wanted to avoid crossing the river on one of the many local bridges, many just barely wide enough for small cars to squeeze past each other. Since we were heading for Frenchtown, our route up River Road on the New Jersey side – a faster, less claustrophobic road than its counterpart across in Pennsylvania – looked doable without too much trouble. It’d only be about a ten mile stretch and my recollection of that piece of road was favorable.
After our first couple of miles up River Road, in spite of cruising at the speed limit I had a big truck riding hard on my tail so I pulled onto the shoulder to let him pass, and then proceeded on our way. As we came around a bend in Titusville, I was initially confused by what was in front of us, and slowed down quickly. There was a large truck like the one that’d just passed, stopped in middle of the narrow two lane road, with some dark smoke coming out of it. My first thought was that it had broken down, but quickly the situation became clearer as we saw several people running towards the truck with fire extinguishers.
I pulled our truck and trailer off the highway and before I was even fully stopped, Stephanie had jumped out, ran back into the trailer, grabbed the fire extinguisher and was sprinting towards the scene to help along with the owners of the house and the business next door. I briefly went to follow, but as the scene became more apparent knew I couldn’t leave our child without one of us.
In front of us on the highway was a large dump truck, with flames growing rapidly around it, on the wrong side of the road, and another vehicle crushed between it and a wall. Fire was climbing up from the truck to engulf a power pole, live lines were already hanging across the road where the pole they connected to had been snapped in half and laid across a lawn. The truck was traveling in the same direction we were, had hit the pole on his right and then cut across the road in front of another vehicle, nearly disintegrating it. We arrived seconds later.
As much as Stephanie and the others tried, there was nothing they could have done to change the outcome, and thankfully none of them were injured in the act. A conflagration enveloped both vehicles, with fuel spilled all over the road, and all we could do was pull back to distraught safety. It wasn’t until later that I realized the truck driver had escaped injury, but there was never any chance for the occupants of the other vehicle.
Out of respect for everyone involved I’m not going to go into greater detail, but as we understand it one of the victims was a veteran firefighter in the very department which had responded to the scene. The tragedy of the situation is still beyond comprehension and I know that the shock hasn’t nearly worn off.
