Truck runs through playground in Valley

A speeding truck barreled through the Greenacres Elementary playground in Spokane Valley on Friday as children dashed to safety.

The truck plowed through several fences and launched over streets at 50 miles per hour before finally coming to a stop up against a barn at Arties Lane and Long Road. The driver, whom police would only describe as a 49-year-old Spokane Valley man, was the only one injured. Police said he may have been suffering from a medical problem.

Police said the man was installing cable in a housing development near the school. Classes had just gotten out at the 17915 E. Fourth Ave. school when the driver’s Cable Works Telecommunications truck raced toward the playground, quickly picking up speed.

“He was hauling through there,” said Jo Marie Catron, who lives across the street from the school.

She spotted the truck just as her daughter was about to return to school to play.

“I told her to stop and he went through the fence,” Catron said. “If I hadn’t called her back, she would have been hit.”

Greenacres Elementary Principal Terry Ellifritz said about a dozen students were in the area where the truck sped through. “There were some kids who had to do a bit of dodging,” she said.

If the vehicle had gone through the area as little as two or three minutes later, it could have been a disaster. “They (the students) would have been sprinkled all over the field.”

The truck drove through the east side of the playground, breaking through two fences. It struck a grassy knoll and launched into the air, leaving its bumper behind, then careened across Fourth Avenue and smashed into a fenced field.

But the truck continued for two more blocks, tearing though a wooden fence, launching over a nearby swale and leaving gouges in the street. It cut across a yard at the intersection of Long Road and Arties Lane, then tore out a hedge and landed on top of some farming equipment.

The driver was incoherent when police arrived, said Cpl. Dave Reagan, a Spokane Valley Police spokesman. “He’s so out of it he can’t tell us what’s going on.”

Witnesses told police that the driver never braked and may have been unconscious during the entire event. “It’s a miracle he wasn’t killed and none of the kids were killed,” Reagan said. “We’re very lucky.”