Getting your house smashed by an out-of-control 73,000-pound dump truck sounds like a particularly bad day for the house, but have you ever wondered what it’s like from the truck’s perspective? No, because you only ever think about yourself. Okay, maybe that’s unfair. Maybe you have considered the fear or, perhaps, unrestrained joy of a runaway dump truck careening across several yards in a quiet New Jersey neighborhood on a lovely spring day. It happened this week, and the dashcam video of the dump truck’s speed run through Woodbury Heights, New Jersey, puts you in the driver’s seat.
According to the recording, the truck left Woodbury-Glassboro road at 1:30 p.m. It obliterated a light pole and careened wildly across several yards on a quiet neighborhood street, reaching speeds of 50 mph before slamming into a house, according to the local ABC news affiliate.
Truck driver suffers medical emergency
Multiple neighbors heard the crash and came running to render aid. Those on the scene noticed the smell of gas and a hissing sound coming from the collapsed side of the house. The force of the crash had knocked the homeowner through two walls. One brave neighbor, Derek Keating, made his way inside the house to help the homeowner, keeping him calm by talking to him through a hole in the floor.
“What do you do in a situation? If you hear a guy screaming for help, and you think you could possibly help him. What are you not going to do something?” Keating told CBS. “I guess I did what I had to do to help him.”
The homeowner was taken to the hospital, as was the driver of the dump tuck after it took 75 to 100 first responders three hours to extract him from the truck. Firefighters needed to shore up the collapsing house before extracting the victims safely. The owner of the trucking company, Zeisloft Trucking, told ABC6 his long-time employee suffered a seizure that caused him to lose control of the vehicle filled with cement sand. While the homeowner and truck driver are stable at a local hospital and are expected to recover, the house is not — it was demolished completely after the truck was painstakingly extracted. Police even evacuated nearby homes due to the risk of injury from the now-unstable building.
Dump trucks doing crimes
We are big fans of dashcams, and have been ever since the Russian dash cam became a staple of internet videos over 10 years ago. They have allowed us to see all sorts of dump truck–related crashes over the years, but particularly over the last two years. For some reason, 2023 was the year dump trucks took out their simmering rage on the public. Four dump-truck related crashes occurred in a single month in 2023, leading to at least four deaths. Also in 2023, a man used a dump truck to get back at his soon-to-be ex-wife. But dump truck crimes aren’t all tragedies. Sometimes they are hilarious, like when a dashcam caught this dump truck slamming its raised bed into a freeway sign just last year in Ohio. It’s a crash that seems to happen every few years. You’d think dump truck drivers would give the rear-view mirror a casual glance every now and then and see their beds rising into the sky, but apparently not everyone is so on the ball.
