Hot stuff

There's still no good explanation of a very strange car fire at Green's Towing Thursday afternoon. The best speculation is that the vehicle, which had been involved in an accident earlier in the day, still had its battery connected. The accident might have short-circuited some wiring, causing heat or a spark. Leaking gasoline then caught fire.
The black-and-white image on page A3 of today's Sun printed a bit dark -- here's what it looked like in color:


There was some question in the newsroom as to why we would cover a car fire -- ordinarily, we don't.
But when we heard on the initial call the words "thick black smoke" "multiple explosions" and "flames showing," it got our attention. The words "multiple explosions," especially.
It's likely the explosions were the sounds of the tires bursting, but we didn't know that at the time. One of them went while I was standing next to the vehicle, and it sounded like a 12-gauge shotgun shell being fired. It was VERY attention-getting.