Fire Truck Crashes Into Farmersville Dairy Queen
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FARMERSVILLE (CBS11) - A fire truck flew through traffic and took out a corner of a Dairy Queen during the Farmersville lunch rush.
Workers did their best Wednesday night to secure the building, but they tell us, they're thankful that's the worst of the damage.
By 11:30am Dairy Queen employee Babbett Pattillo already had her hands full with the lunch crowd. She was at the front of the restaurant taking an order when she realized something was wrong just outside.
"You could hear it. It sounded like a train, and then the next thing you know it just flew right by me through the store. It happened so quick," Pattillo said.
Investigators say a repair worker was on his way to the Greenville Fire Department to deliver the truck. He was eastbound on Highway-380, when police say something caused him to cross into the westbound lanes and head toward the Dairy Queen. Clayton Hill had just finished his meal when he walked outside.
"It was just a big fire truck just flying right across, man. I mean it was crazy. It didn't look real to me," Hill said.
Inside, Pattillo says customers began filing out the doors grateful to be alive.
"Everything just flew everywhere. Everything that was in the front, a lot of it's in the kitchen. Everything just flew everywhere. It was just total chaos," Pattillo said.
Hill ran to the driver's side of the firetruck to try to help the driver, but the door was stuck.
"And so I went to the windshield. He just said, see if you can get my seat belt undone, and so I reached in there and undid his seatbelt for him, and then we were also able to open up his door enough to where we could get him out," Hill said.
Police say, like the driver of the firetruck, the customer in this SUV at the drive through had non-life-threatening injuries. But one employee was missing.
"We started looking for the drive through girl because we couldn't find her, and we thought she was under the debris, so we were trying to dig for her until somebody saw her outside," Pattillo said.
That employee also had only moderate injuries, leaving Pattillo and other co-workers relieved, but still rattled.
"I'm still shaking. I'm still shaking. It was that close," Pattillo said.
A Greenville spokesperson tells us it's normal policy that a repair worker delivers a firetruck after maintenance is performed. The Farmersville Police Department is in charge of the investigation into the cause of the crash.
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