Roasted sweet potato truck turns into mobile fireball.
On the night of Match 12, the operators of the 119 emergency call center in Kumamoto City received a call about a car that was on fire. Then they received another call about the car, and then another. However, the multiple reports weren’t due to diligent residents all reporting the same blaze in a parking lot or on the side of the road. No, the calls that kept coming in were coming from different parts of the city, because the car was being driven while it was on fire.
And if you’re imagining a little smoke coming from the engine compartment, think again.
As shown in the video above, this was a full-on fireball barreling down the road, with the entire back section of the truck engulfed in roaring flames.
Now, you might be wondering where someone would be in such a rush to get to that they’d keep driving their vehicle even if it was on fire, and the answer, in this case, has a certain logic to it, as the driver was speeding to the nearest fire station in order to get the blaze put out.
▼ Cameras captured the burning truck traveling west along National Route 3, which runs alongside the Shirakawa River in downtown Kumamoto and passes within a few blocks of the city’s West Fire Station, at around 9:50 p.m.
As the truck drove, pieces of not only burning debris fell from the vehicle, but also flaming sweet potatoes.
That’s because this was, in fact, a yakiimo truck, a type of food truck equipped with a stove on the back for cooking sweet potatoes, or yakiimo, as they’re called in Japanese. Usually, yakiimo trucks operate similarly to ice creams trucks in the U.S., cruising slowly around residential or entertainment districts while playing a short jingle to attract customers. On this night, though, this yakiimo truck was driving as quickly as it could while its 70-something owner/driver leaned on the horn to alert other motorists and pedestrians to the inferno that needed to get by.
Amazingly, no injuries were reported, and the driver managed to reach the fire station, where firemen, having the shortest dispatch distance of their careers, were able to extinguish the flames, though not before the entire back section was burnt down to the frame, as seen in the video below.
It turns out that this is actually a fairly famous yakiimo truck among the local community, known for its distinctive collection of character figures attached to the roof of the cab and given the nickname Gekko Kamen, after a Japanese superhero TV show from the 1950s. The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but it seems fairly obvious that something went wrong with the setup for the truck’s wood-burning stove. The driver says that while he was out on his sweet potato-selling rounds, he noticed smoke coming from the back of his truck, and since he was in the city center already, felt the best thing to do was to drive to the fire station.
