Saturday, February 6, 2010

Icelcars


I rode over to our local tow yard to inspect a vehicle involved in a crash I was investigating. I noticed numerous patrol cars from local agencies (including South City). I realized that the K9 officers were doing training.

I bumped into one of the K9 handlers, Semper Fi Mac. Now Mac and I had been beat partners many years ago on the graveyard shift. Our entire weekend graveyard shift were a bunch of clowns, always playing pranks on one another. Those were some really good, fun times.

I asked Mac if he had been staying out of trouble. The look on his face told me otherwise. He was telling me that weeks ago when we were experiencing some very very cold nights, actually freezing nights he was bored. Well Mac's idle mind had the great idea of watering down a couple of patrol cars.

He was at the station finishing up reports from the weekend and every fifteen minutes he'd walk out into the parking lot and hose down the two patrol cars. He was laughing as he was telling me this story that the ice had built up so much on the two patrol cars that the small gap where the roof and car door meet was totally filled in.

He told me you could run your hand over where the gap was and you wouldn't be able to feel anything discerning where the roof and car door met.

Yeah, he was sure proud of himself. I got to laughing so hard as he was telling me this story that I thought I might have broken a rib. He was very descriptive about the small icicles hanging from the patrol car's emergency light bar, spotlights and wheel wells.

Since water doesn't instantly freeze, the water on the ground eventually froze. When the dayshift officers arrived to begin their day, they noticed the ice on the parking lot.

Well the city public works people had to come out and put salt on the frozen part of the parking lot. It took one of the officer's 30 minutes to eventually get the door open which didn't include the time spent trying to get a key into a frozen car door lock.

Mac paid though, during the time it took the officers to get into their patrol cars and de-ice them, Mac was held over from his graveyard shift for any possible calls for service until all was well with the icelcars.

2 comments:

  1. Is this not proof? What goes around will come back and may bite you in the butt.

    ReplyDelete
  2. One of my former co workers (a not very popular one) went on vacation and left his car in the parking lot of the station. That's OK, but he took a prime spot and blocked another one. One of the the other guys in the station thought he'd help out by washing the guys car while he was on vacation. In February. In New England.

    So, every day he'd wash the car and add another coat of ice. By the time the guy came back there were several inches of ice on his car. Unlike CA, here it stays cold for days on end. In this case it was over a week before he could get his car out.

    ReplyDelete