Kudos to writer Matthew Rink for a great story and to photographer Kevin Whitlock for a set of nice pics! Here's the story from The Independent:
MASSILLON, OH —Dan Reed waited with arms crossed as the city’s first responders hustled to rescue the woman trapped in the upside-down truck.
Forty feet below him, down a rocky bank of the Tuscarawas River, rested the smashed-up, red, Ford F150. With its underbelly exposed, Reed, his two brothers, Chuck and Tom, and son, Ryan, faced the routine challenge of clearing the wreckage.
As soon as the Thursday morning accident victim was transported from the scene, Dan and his family crew got to work.
Two extra, heavy-duty tow trucks, perched atop the Cherry Road bridge and the Ohio 21 intersection, spit out strands of metal rope to the truck below. Dan grabbed and hooked the chains onto the truck’s steel skeleton.
He motioned to the guys above.
The tow truck’s few tugs were enough to align the red Ford, top down in a field of grass, for an eventual lift.
What looked complicated and cumbersome for the crowd that gathered along the bridge and bike path above, appeared to be old-hat for Dan and the family business.
Harold “Hendy” Reed founded the family business in 1958. It’s grown into a five-man operation with a fleet of 14 trucks. Dan learned the business when he was a teenager and has been at it ever since.
“We’ve all grown up in the business,” he said.
The company works mostly in Stark County and Northeast Ohio, but services several states. It handles site cleanup for the city on a rotating basis and does work for both the Stark County Sheriff’s Office and Ohio Highway Patrol.
In July 2008, Reed’s was called to Jackson Township, where a 100-plus-ton rolling mill bound for the Timken Co. in Canton got stuck attempting to negotiate a turn at Lafayette and High Mill Avenue.
Reed’s Towing used two of its extra, heavy duty tow trucks to pull the 150-foot-long, 20-foot-wide tractor trailer back onto the roadway.
On Thursday morning, the Reed brothers arrived at the intersection of Ohio 21 and Cherry Road prepared for some more heavy lifting. They flawlessly maneuvered the red Ford from its top to its side, and then back onto its four tires.
But instead of pulling it up the steep river bank, the tow truck hoisted it straight up some 40 feet and then back onto the street. The whole process took about 45 minutes.
“Nice job,” Massillon police Sgt. J.J. DiLoreto told Dan and his brothers after the successful lift.
“These guys really know what they are doing,” DiLoreto said. “They are the best. I’ve been on the job for 20-some years and when we have car accidents like this it’s good to know we have them in this city.”
The accident reminded Dan of the time years back when the company had to pull a vehicle from river waters below the Walnut Road bridge.
“At least this one wasn’t in the water,” he said. “We don’t do this type of job every day, but it is kind of routine.”
No comments:
Post a Comment