That Time the Drunken Idiot Ran His Truck into a Lake

Oh boy, do I have a story for you or what?!

Tonight a neighbor friend and I went to my sister's house for the evening. We had a good time, eating mint chocolate chip brownies (recipe coming soon) and watching Mean Girls. It's October 3rd, what do you expect? (At least it was when I started writing this post.) We drove back to our apartment complex only to discover that I had been locked out of my house. I waited in my car for a minute since my mom was right around the corner. All of a sudden, I see flashing police lights everywhere. My mom pulls up and we walk to the door where a little gathering is waiting opposite our home.

We decide to go see what the commotion is and find this. Bottom line of the story, there's a truck in the river. No one knows if anyone is in it. No one even sees the tire marks in the grass, and it's lying parallel to the riverbanks. People (including the firefighters!) start joking that a ghost dropped it in. Silly stuff. 

We start hearing a few different accounts. The first story we heard was that a soaking wet man had been pounding on people's doors in the complex. Apparently he couldn't find his apartment, was totally wasted, and talked about how he had gone "mudding." 

The second story that we heard was that a woman walking her dog had seen the truck in the water and called the police. 

Finally, they tell us the third story about the police officers finding him first, tasing him to the ground, and arresting him. (I kinda wish they had told us that story before people started assuming someone was still in the truck.)

So of course, we decide that we have to wait with this crowd. We were intrigued and wanted to see how they'd get the truck out! First they sent in a pair of police divers:

They assessed the situation, swam through the cab, made sure everything was safe and that everyone was for sure out. They attached a rope to the front bumper and tied it to an itty bitty sign. Seemed kind of pointless to me, but I digress. After this point, things got really slow. The police were just standing around talking, no one was telling us anything. A lot of people went home, ourselves included. We figured they'd wait until the morning before anything else could be done. 

Luckily, all of this can be seen and heard through our windows. We start settling in for the night, when we start hearing more vehicles come in. We look out and the tow truck had just arrived. So of course, our curiosity drug us back out of bed. (I apologize now for any poor quality nighttime pictures. Oops!)

Here's the divers going back in following the rope they originally tied. The hooked the truck up to the tow truck with a supposedly strong enough cable.

Here's it coming up and out of the water. This part was super fun (sarcasm) because the cable snapped! Luckily, it made its way to land and they had more cables. It was slightly drifting back into the water, but they were able to attach a new cable before it was totally submersed. And of course, the new cable snapped. These poor fellows probably just want to be home!

PS The tail lights aren't on in the picture. They went out after about five minutes once we had gotten there. Chevy strong! 

It probably took a total of 20-30 minutes to get the truck up on to the bed of the tow truck. And boy was a lot of water draining out of everything! I'm sure you could fully imagine.

Once on the tow truck, we were able to see that this poor truck had a temporary tag, and no plate. Meaning that this truck was probably brand, spanking new. I really just don't understand the actions that led to this incident, but I suppose some people are just dumb dumbs.

We are so close to the ending! Stick with me!

Once the truck is loaded, the tow truck attempts to start moving. However, it rained today. Yep, you guessed it. He was stuck. It took him about another half hour of digging and such jazz to get out. We went back inside for this part too, but he was honking like crazy and the few people left outside were cheering. Thank goodness I was still awake or I would've been cranky to wake up to that! ;)