Wienermobile Crashes in Racine!

Maggie: Read the Racine Journal Times account -it's completely great coverage!!!!!


MOUNT PLEASANT — Nick Krupp couldn’t help it; he was talking about the vehicle that smashed into the front of his house Friday, and he was chuckling.The frontal assault at 1200 Kenilworth Ave. had been committed by a wrong-way Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.“Am I supposed to be mad?” said Krupp, 23, who rents the house from his mother. “I can’t believe this.”Like a 23-foot-long, curved battering ram, the fiberglass frankfurter had slammed into the house foundation, garage door and deck that overhangs the driveway.
An Oscar Mayer Wienermobile crashed into the home and outdoor deck of Nick Krupp, 1200 Kenilworth Ave., around 11 a.m. Friday, July 17, 2009. According to a witness, the vehicle was parked in the driveway. The driver lurched the vehicle forward instead of backing out of the driveway, hitting Krupp's deck and cracking the foundation of his house. Handout Photo by Tom McCauley The impact lifted and snapped joists supporting the deck, cracked the house foundation and pushed the garage door inward.A 12-foot tire skid mark showed how fast the wienermobile — powered by a V-8, 350 Vortec engine, according to the company’s Web site — must have accelerated.Surveying a piece of fiberglass left at the scene, Krupp asked, “That’s part of the bun, right?”
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His neighbor, Zachary Nielsen, 11, was there just before noon to see the whole thing. “I thought they were selling (hot dogs),” the boy said. “I ran down here with money in my pocket.”What he saw and heard afterward from the two female Oscar Mayer employees, as well as the company’s account, was that the young women were on their way to a scheduled wienermobile appearance. They accidently found themselves on dead-end Kenilworth Avenue and pulled into the last driveway on the left to turn around.One got out to help guide her companion. But the driver had the transmission in a forward gear — not reverse. The giant hot dog hurtled forward and slammed into the house. Nielsen said the impact “sounded like a gunshot.”No one was home, and no one was injured. A tow truck had to remove the vehicle.The driver — who Oscar Mayer said was a first-year wienermobile driver — was distraught, Nielsen said. “One was almost starting to cry,” he said. “She was getting emotional.”Krupp dialed 911 when he came home about 2 p.m. and saw the damage. But until he talked to an officer from the scene, he had no inkling what had caused the damage.“He said, ‘Man, you’re not going to believe this even if I tell you,’” Krupp recalled.A Kraft Foods/Oscar Mayer spokeswoman said, “We are working with the local authorities and the appropriate insurance companies to fix the damage and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause the homeowner.”Krupp’s mother, Paula Righter, may be happy that a company of Kraft’s size may be there to pay the repair bills. Friday, she said, she was about to finalize a homeowners insurance policy with Geico.When they learned that she needed to file a wienermobile-inflicted claim, she said they rejected her application.