Carrying a full load, the Prestige water truck, above, careened out of control in Fish Bay, tearing through a bathroom of a villa before landing across Fish Bay Road and blocking traffic for several hours.
Amazingly no one was injured when a water truck, carrying the driver and two small children, plummeted down a hillside, tore through a rental villa and overturned on Fish Bay Road around 3:30 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, May 19.
The truck was carrying a full load of water when the driver apparently missed a hairpin turn heading down to Estate Fish Bay, overturned and plummeted down a rocky ridge, according to information from V.I. Police Department officials.
Guests had arrived at a short-term rental villa mere minutes ahead of the truck slamming through a corner of the structure and tearing off the bathroom wing, before landing across Fish Bay Road near Ditleff Point.
The water truck completely blocked the road to Fish Bay for several hours on May 19, prompting residents to lend and borrow vehicles on either side of the wreck in order to reach their homes or travel to Cruz Bay.
One resident in the area, who asked to not be named, was harrowingly close to the accident and described as “amazing” the fact that no one was injured.
“It’s just amazing that no one was hurt,” she said. “There easily could have been someone driving up the hill or coming down the hill. If I had left a few minutes sooner, it could have been me coming up the hill.”
“The timing was amazing,” said the resident.
On its way over the hillside, the truck could have easily struck several telephone poles, hit a larger portion of the rental villa or collided into other vehicles. Remarkably, there were no other vehicles on the roadway at time of the incident, explained the resident.
The occupants of the water truck — the driver and two small children described as between six to 10 years old, according to the resident — managed to get out of the vehicle at some point and all three escaped injury.
The truck’s water load and diesel fuel were dumped down the hillside into Fish Bay before the wreck was cleared, sometime before 8 p.m. on May 19. The smell of diesel could still be clearly detected in the area on Friday, May 25.
With sunny skies the day of the accident, weather seems not to have played a role in the incident.
“There was no rain that day; it was actually pretty sunny,” said a resident about road conditions on May 19.
The guests in the damaged rental villa were also uninjured and moved into different accommodations the day of the accident, according to officials.
VIPD officials had no information last week on what caused the accident and the department’s Traffic Investigation Unit continued to investigate the incident as of press time, according to VIPD spokesperson Melody Rames.