awoke to explosions and fire Wednesday when a small plane carrying
employees of an electric car company crashed in dense fog, spewing
debris over several homes.
The plane hit 60-foot-high transmission lines, and its fuselage was found tangled in wires. On board were three employees of
“Tesla is a small, tightly knit company, and this is a tragic day for us,” said
Emergency responders said it was miraculous that no
one on the ground was seriously injured. Four houses and five vehicles
were damaged.
“It got dark, and then there was an orange flash,”
Ramirez said. “Two seconds later the house shook. I looked outside.
There was a huge flame.”
Most of the city of
was open but had no power and only sporadic telephone service and
libraries were shuttered. Hospitals canceled non-essential surgeries
and operated with emergency generators.
The twin-engine plane crashed shortly after taking off from
the National Transportation Safety Board, said investigators were
“looking into the weather conditions.” An hour before the crash there
was only an eighth of a mile of visibility at the airport, he said.
The fog was so thick that emergency personnel did
not immediately spot the plane, which ricocheted off a retaining wall
and slid into three parked cars, torching them.
“Until they got right up on the incident, they didn’t know what they had,”
chief of the Menlo Park Fire Protection District, said at a morning
news conference down the street from the crash. Bodies of the plane’s
occupants, covered with yellow blankets, could be seen under a tree
near a tangle of metal.
“There are miraculously no reports of anyone else injured,” Schapelhouman said.
Some residents of the neighborhood of modest
bungalows and barred windows said they had been concerned in the past
about low-flying planes, and questioned why the aircraft was permitted
to take off in dense fog.
“I went outside, and you could see the fire flame
up,” said the longtime resident. “That’s when I became very, very
frightened and went inside the house.”
Schapelhouman said part of a wing hit a house in
front of a day care center. The house caught fire, but those inside,
including at least one child, escaped. The center was unscathed.
The plane was registered to
A neighbor left a pot of lilies on Bourn’s front
porch Wednesday with a note that read: “Doug, Thank you for always
being there for me and my family. You will forever be missed.”
Despite past troubles, Tesla has been gaining momentum as gas prices have risen and consumers have warmed to electric cars.
The firm’s Roadster sports car sells for about
“Tesla isn’t a very big company, and this tragedy will be felt, I’m sure,” said
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