Traffic was halted at a Cambridge intersection on Saturday night when a 30-foot boat landed in the road, Cambridge police said.
Around 6:40 p.m., a driver towing the boat on a trailer stopped for the traffic light at Cambridge and Third streets, East Cambridge. When the light changed, the driver accelerated and the safety chains on the trailer failed, causing the boat to slide off the trailer and into the road near the crosswalk, police said.
“There’s a boat on Cambridge Street – literally like a boat on the street, on the road,” a dispatcher said, according to scanner reports. “We probably need some units over here.”
Police closed the road to traffic at around 7 p.m., they said, as the owner of the boat reached out to AAA but had “no luck” and they searched for a tower with a flatbed big enough to handle the job. The driver said he couldn’t afford the price quoted him for a tow that he’d have to pay out of pocket, meaning the boat would be impounded, police said.
The intersection reopened about 40 minutes later, after a tow company was able to place the boat back on the trailer. No injuries were reported in connection to the incident.
An officer on the scene said it was the “first time in 29 years we’ve had a boat in the road.” In a statement on the department’s social media feeds, police called the incident “unusual.”
In previous odd boat-out-of-water news, an MBTA Fitchburg Line commuter rail hit a boat left on the tracks at 12:15 a.m. April 10 between Cambridge and Belmont. An “unknown person/s left a boat on the right of way,” transit police said, but there were no injuries reported and no damage to the train.
A stronger
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Amazing! This is the kind of local news we deserve
City council will delay the boat lanes now too!
Did anyone ask the driver if he’d ever towed a boat before? Chains secure the trailer to the car; they would mess up the gel coat on the boat. The trailer has a cable that hooks to the bow that you use to pull the boat onto the trailer, and then you tie it down with straps, not chains.