Pumped Up!
At-Risk Survivor
1989, California | The location:
a small boat harbor in Santa Cruz. The victims: a sailboat and
its owner. The opening scene: employees sprinting away from the
dock’s fuel pumps -- a vision guaranteed to evoke dread in
the souls of innocent bystanders.
If those around you are fleeing from danger, it’s a sure
bet that you should follow in their footsteps. Within seconds,
the entire deck of a cabin cruiser blasted five feet out of the
water, propelled by enough force to fell an elephant. A bystander
outside a nearby restaurant reported seeing a man fly from the
airborne deck and land in the water near the flaming vessel.
The Harbor Patrol was on the scene within seconds. They fished
the unconscious man from the water, and then quickly hauled the
burning wreck over to a boat ramp before it set the fuel dock
ablaze.
It turned out that the man spotted flying through the air had
just purchased the boat, and was filling its tanks before he set
sail to San Francisco. As he prepared to motor away from the fuel
dock, a dock attendant noticed that he had pumped the fuel into
a fishing pole holder instead of his tanks. The alarmed employee
instructed him to turn on his bilge pump and blowers, but the
man stated that he was in too much of a hurry to wait for the
fumes to clear.
As the attendant ran for his life, sparks from the engine’s
starter motor ignited the accumulated fumes.
The boat was dragged from the water with a bulldozer, and hauled
to the junkyard as scrap. The owner was alive when he was carted
off by the ambulance, but one way or another, his odds of surviving
long in this world seem poor.
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