Dave Fornell posts at Firehouse magazine about an incident Thursday night on E. Grand Boulevard in which a brick thrown from the Packard Plant narrowly missed a Detroit Fire Department lieutenant racing by in a rig, en route to a predawn fire.
According ot Fornell:
I happened to be in Detroit last night and rather than documenting a fire or two or three in a blazing single family dwelling, I stumbled into something uniquely Detroit -- a brick-pitching from above that fractured the windshield of Squad 3 and had it hit a bit a bit to the west, could have seriously injured the boss, Lt. Mike Nevin.
The fire to which they were responding was minor, so after being released, they headed back to East Grand Boulevard with the Detroit Police to look at the situation.
Officials surmised that persons unknown rained down projectiles for most of the night on unsuspecting motorists on East Grand Boulevard, driving by the old abandoned Packard automobile plant--a hulking three square block rotting complex that is symbolic of all that is wrong with the Motor City.
Around 4 a.m., the Justin Verlander wannabes on the roof of the complex thought they hit the mother lode when a large fire truck with lights and sirens passed beneath. The lieutenant had his side window open and a millisecond or two later, he might have been in bad shape medically, although some said later that a bunch of stitches to the face might have been an improvement. Nothing like firehouse humor to help you cope with the grim consequences of just doing your job.
Squad 3 is stationed in an old red firehouse at E. Grand Boulevard and Moran, just west of the plant.
In an unrelated development Friday, crews began what is expected to a month-long project -- cleaning up of the site, part of multi-year redevelopment plan by the plant owner, Fernando Palazuelo, the Peru-based developer who was also expected to secure the complex of 43 buildings.
