Posted on 04/21/2004 4:54:15 PM PDT by John W
Federal authorities have joined city police in an investigation of a bizarre episode early Wednesday in which a stolen truck was crashed through the fence surrounding a fuel storage and processing plant along U.S.-24 near Meridian Road.
Police Chief Terry Stoffel said police are not ruling out the possibility that the incident was a terrorist attack that went awry.
“I’m not saying it is or it’s not an act of terrorism,” Stoffel said. “But everything needs to be looked at … You have to treat it as it could be and consider all the possibilities.”
The incident happened shortly after 3 a.m. Wednesday and was witnessed by an employee at the site, Stoffel said. The occupant or occupants of the truck fled the scene.
The pickup truck was stolen from an unspecified location on Buchanan Street sometime Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, Stoffel said. It crashed through a fence at the Gladieux Trading and Marketing compound, 4761N U.S.-24, struck a guy wire that flipped up and shorted out power lines, and eventually crashed into two conduits that stopped the vehicle. At least one, and possibly two, people were seen running from the truck, Stoffel said.
Police found no footprints or anything else at the scene to indicate the direction the truck’s occupant or occupants took. However, police are checking area hospitals to see if they treated anyone with an unexplained head injury.
Stoffel said he doesn’t know if the interior of the truck bears any signs of an occupant being injured, but believes such an injury is possible “just (because of) the ride the vehicle took to crash the fence.”
The truck veered off the highway, then jumped a shallow ditch before crashing through the fence at the northeast corner of Gladieux Trading and Marketing.
Police explained that when the truck hit the fence, it snapped a utility pole guy wire. The broken wire whipped into a power line, creating an explosive short-circuit that plunged the tank farm area into darkness.
A mechanic working in a nearby maintenance building told police he saw the truck drive east toward the electrically operated main gate. The driver saw it was closed, then drove in a circle around the maintenance building before taking an access road south, along the east side of the property.
The truck followed the road to a 15-dike. Those lines were bent, and a series of lines beyond them, containing both gasoline and the solvent naptha, were scraped but otherwise not damaged.
The crashed truck had to be lifted off the lines before it could be towed away.
Employees from the PHD Inc. plant, east of the Gladieux property, ran outside when they heard the explosion that accompanied the power outage. They told police they saw two people jump from the truck and run east, toward the security fence separating the properties.
The people from the truck were not seen after that. Stoffel said later this morning, however, that there are conflicting reports as to whether one person or two people jumped out of the truck. Witnesses were unable to say if the person or persons were male or female and were unable to give any physical description.
Beyond the area where the truck stopped is a 12-foot deep, 20-foot wide ditch separating the dikes that surround the tanks and the separation facility.
A few yards west of where the truck came to rest is a shed containing maintenance supplies. Glass in the door to the shed was found broken Wednesday morning, and police believe the truck’s occupants might have tried to enter the shed after the accident.
Stoffel contacted the Indiana attorney general’s office, which sends out daily dispatches to law enforcement agencies about possible terrorist activity. Those dispatches ask police to notify that office if they see anything out of the ordinary that could affect a large number of people.
An FBI agent from Fort Wayne joined Huntington detectives at the scene Wednesday morning. Stoffel said the FBI will lead the investigation.
Stoffel said he doesn’t know what kind of damage could have been caused had the truck gotten any farther into the facility. He added that he doesn’t recall any prior acts of vandalism being directed toward the tank farm.
(Peg is the Attorney General of Wisconsin. If you haven't been following her interesting adventures with bottles and state cars, there's a thread nearby.)
It’s probably kids or drunks screwing around. Most tank farms are surrounded by a chain link fence that you could drive through any time you wanted. You could drive through the closed gate too.
But once inside, most tank farms have containment walls around the tanks that you aren’t going to be driving through. The wall often has ramps to allow authorized vehicles in for doing work, but those are usually gated by heavy pipe or track rails that you also aren’t going to drive through.
I don’t really see the point of trying to ram a truck into something - you're not going to be ramming a tank at any tank farm or loading facility I've ever worked at. Things like loading racks are surrounded by 10" - 12" iron pipes to keep you from accidentally (or purposely) smacking something.
You could cause more problems doing other things. But they’re watching for things like that too, I'd imagine.
No? Then I go with the drunk theory.
The small minds in the media are fixated on what has happened, to the exclusion of all other possibilities.
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