It's been a bad day.
Please don't take a picture.
"Bad Day" by R.E.M.
You don't see this every day. Actually, I've never seen it.
From the Journal Times:
Nick Krupp couldn’t help it; he was talking about the vehicle that smashed into the front of his house Friday, and he was chuckling.
The frontal assault at 1200 Kenilworth Ave. had been committed by a wrong-way Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.
“Am I supposed to be mad?” said Krupp, 23, who rents the house from his mother. “I can’t believe this.”
Like a 23-foot-long, curved battering ram, the fiberglass frankfurter had slammed into the house foundation, garage door and deck that overhangs the driveway.
The impact lifted and snapped joists supporting the deck, cracked the house foundation and pushed the garage door inward.
That's a lot of damage.
A 12-foot tire skid mark showed how fast the wienermobile — powered by a V-8, 350 Vortec engine, according to the company’s Web site — must have accelerated.
Surveying a piece of fiberglass left at the scene, Krupp asked, “That’s part of the bun, right?”
His neighbor, Zachary Nielsen, 11, was there just before noon to see the whole thing. “I thought they were selling (hot dogs),” the boy said. “I ran down here with money in my pocket.”
Poor Zachary. What a disappointment!
What he saw and heard afterward from the two female Oscar Mayer employees, as well as the company’s account, was that the young women were on their way to a scheduled wienermobile appearance. They accidentally found themselves on dead-end Kenilworth Avenue and pulled into the last driveway on the left to turn around.
One got out to help guide her companion. But the driver had the transmission in a forward gear — not reverse. The giant hot dog hurtled forward and slammed into the house. Nielsen said the impact “sounded like a gunshot.”
No one was home, and no one was injured. A tow truck had to remove the vehicle.
...Krupp dialed 911 when he came home about 2 p.m. and saw the damage. But until he talked to an officer from the scene, he had no inkling what had caused the damage.
“He said, ‘Man, you’re not going to believe this even if I tell you,’” Krupp recalled.
What are the odds that you would come home to find your house damaged so severely?
Then, what are the odds the damage was caused by the Wienermobile?
Very slim. I bet you're more likely to be struck by lightning.
...A Kraft Foods/Oscar Mayer spokeswoman said, “We are working with the local authorities and the appropriate insurance companies to fix the damage and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause the homeowner.”
Krupp’s mother, Paula Righter, may be happy that a company of Kraft’s size may be there to pay the repair bills. Friday, she said, she was about to finalize a homeowners insurance policy with Geico.
When they learned that she needed to file a wienermobile-inflicted claim, she said they rejected her application.
Of course, it's caused a lot of inconvenience; but the homeowner is so lucky that a high profile vehicle like the Wienermobile did the damage.
The home is uninsured.
I think Kraft/Oscar Mayer can be counted on to cover the repairs.
In a way, this was Paula Righter's lucky day.
Things didn't work out so well for 11-year-old Zachary Nielsen.
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WITI Wienermobile Crash Photo Gallery
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