Breaking: Driver emerges unscathed from mysterious truck fire

David Fagan, 60, was expected to pull into a grocery store in Oromocto, New Brunswick tomorrow morning at 5 a.m. with a delivery of dry goods, but the truck driver may instead be thinking about just how close he came to the end earlier today when his vehicle inexplicably caught fire on Sources Boulevard in Pointe Claire. “It just had a fuel leak,” said Fagan at the scene, looking a little shocked but otherwise unhurt, as firefighters busily poured water on the smouldering wreckage of the brand-new Freightliner 2010-model Cascadia vehicle and tow trucks pulled in.

Fagan said he had been driving along Sources Boulevard northbound when, inexplicably, flames and smoke began bursting from his bumper.

He tried to swerve off the boulevard to avoid being a danger to other drivers during rush hour, when the incident happened, and he scraped a telephone pole at the side of the road. “She just stopped on her own (at that point),” he said of the truck.

Fagan ran out and called 911 on his cell phone immediately, right before calling his wife to tell her the story. “I lost everything,” he said, referring to a personal television set and DVD player he hauls with him on his long trips. The truck, however, belonged to the company Fagan works for, Connors Transfer.

Dressed in a baseball cap, a jacket and jeans as he praised emergency units for their quick response time, Fagan tried to remain good-humoured. “They’ll probably have a fire sale, or a water-damage sale,” he said with a smile of the Sobeys grocery store awaiting delivery in Oromocto.

Sources Boulevard North remained blocked off by police cars between Belmont and Summerhill as three fire trucks remained parked there with hoses first drenching the wreckage, and then each of the pallets that were brought out one by one. The smell of burnt cookies and other canned goods momentarily filled the air.

One official estimated the work would take about four hours. “We’ll have to separate the truck and the trailer,” explained Glenn Comeau, owner of West Island Towing, a local company that works with emergency crews to evacuate accidents off of roads.

Comeau said he received a call at about 5:30 p.m. on the accident.

Two of his tow trucks, as well as a tractor and a container, were there when The Chronicle arrived.

He said firefighters had to ensure each pallet had no traces of smoke or cinder left on it before the tractor could take its remains and dump them into the container.

Firefighters had poured so much water on the truck’s hulking carcass that they had to crack its trailer open with a pick-axe to let some of it back out to be able to reach for all the pallets.

Comeau was relieved nobody had been hurt. “We had a similar accident in September,” he recalled, reminiscing a truck falling off of the Île Aux Tourtes bridge near Vaudreuil Dorion further west. There were no survivors from that wreckage.