Toyota Prius sales pass Ford Explorer
The icon of Americas SUV passion falls victim to stubbornly high gas prices and an increasingly stringent regulatory climate.
Toyota Prius sales pass Ford Explorer
Car vs. Telephone Wires in Texas
On June 13, 2004, at approximately 8:30 AM, Community Volunteer Fire Department’s Engine 2 and Ambulance 2 were dispatched to the intersection of Alief-Clodine Road and Metro Boulevard in Southwest Harris County, Texas for the report of a car versus telephone pole.
Upon arrival, the engine company found a vehicle still running, hanging on the telephone wires by its right front tire.
Witnesses reported that the car had been traveling westbound on Alief-Clodine when the driver lost control of the vehicle, crossed the median, and made contact with the guide wire from the ground to the telephone pole, propelling the vehicle upward onto the wires.
Witnesses also reported that the driver jumped down from the vehicle and ran to catch a bus prior to the arrival of Engine 2 and the Harris County Sheriff’s Department.
The vehicle ran for over an hour until the oil had completely drained from the motor and it seized.
Several wreckers and a Southwestern Bell crew removed the vehicle from its perch.
http://cms.firehouse.com/content/article/article.jsp?sectionId=45&id=32289
Tourism of Doom
DENNIS and STACIE WOODS, a married couple from Seattle, choose their vacation destinations based on what they fear is fated to destruction.
This month it was a camping and kayaking trip around the Galápagos Islands. Last year, it was a stay at a remote lodge in the Amazon, and before that, an ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro.
“We wanted to see the islands this year,” Mr. Woods, a lawyer, said last week in a hotel lobby here, “because we figured they’re only going to get worse.”
The visit to the Amazon was “to try to see it in its natural state before it was turned into a cattle ranch or logged or burned to the ground,” Mr. Woods said. Kilimanjaro was about seeing the sunrise on the highest peak in Africa before the ice cap melts, as some forecasters say it will within the next dozen years.
Next on their list: the Arctic before the ice is gone.
