Frozen Cars

c Tribalwar

This Autoblog post about a Tribalwar member named “Dweeb” shows his car (pictured above) frozen solid while parked near a burst water pipe. That photo reminded me of a funny story. I once lived a few doors down from the Chicago Fire House across from Wrigley Field; in the neighborhood many of us knew the firemen and some of us would use their Coke machine regularly. Well, I was over in the fire house one below zero day to get a Coke when the guys were just returning from a frozen run. While talking to the firemen about working in those frigid conditions one of them recalled another frozen car. This car was a brand new BMW that was parked in front of a fire hydrant and as you the reader can only guess there was a fire across the street from the hydrant on that below zero day. The commotion of the fire trucks and sirens did not alert the BMW owner to his peril so the firemen hooked up to the hydrant by breaking the driver and passenger windows and running their fire hose through the car. One of the guys made sure that the hose’s leak sprayed through the inside of the car. I must point out that the selfish BMW owner was endangering the firemen and all of the people living adjacent to the hydrant with his illegal choice of a parking spot. After several hours of fighting the fire in below zero temperatures it came time for the firemen to retrieve their hoses, not content to leave the BMW with a few broken windows and a ruined and iced-down interior one of the guys took his window shattering tool and hit the windshield. The tool that he used makes spider cracks form in glass so that the glass can be broken without shattering; this meant that if the BMW owner attempted to scrape the prodigious amount ice off of his windshield that his scraper would go right through the glass. The lesson here is not that firemen are assholes, again the ignorant BMW owner had endangered many lives with his selfish actions; the lesson is that you should never park in front of fire hydrants.