East Palo Alto Plane Crash kills 3 Tesla Motors Employees
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A fog-shrouded East Palo Alto neighborhood was thrown into chaos Wednesday when a twin-engine Cessna crashed shortly after an early-morning takeoff, spilling wreckage and bodies onto a quiet bayside street — and triggering a massive outage that turned high-tech Palo Alto into a powerless island for 10 hours.
The pilot and two passengers — all employees of Tesla Motors — were killed and three houses were damaged, including a home day care center.
The plane brought down a high tension transmission tower, then broke apart in a dramatic and terrifying descent over the East Palo Alto neighborhood. A wing slammed into the day care, landing gear smashed into a garage, an engine careened into a carport and the fuselage skidded to a halt in the middle of Beech Street. Flames shot out from houses and debris.
Miraculously, nobody on the ground was injured.
Menlo Park Fire Chief Harold Schapelhouman said he believes the plane clipped a power line on a PG&E high-tension transmission tower shortly after lifting off from the Palo Alto Airport runway just before 8 a.m., headed for Hawthorne Municipal Airport in Southern California.
Moments after the crash, the power went out in neighboring Palo Alto.
The city relies on PG&E’s transmission lines to feed its city-run utility. Schools stayed open with teachers’ improvising with no computers and principals using airhorns instead of class bells. Stanford Hospital resorted to backup power and diverted all nonemergency calls to hospitals outside the city.
Businesses throughout the city were either forced to close or count cash the old-fashioned way. Some merchants took to the sidewalks to hawk coffee, sandwiches and pastries. But many blacked out of Palo Alto’s high-tech offices left for Menlo Park and Mountain View to crash at Wi-Fi cafes.
FATALITIES : Three employees of Tesla Motors die when a Cessna 310R crashes on takeoff Wednesday morning.
EAST PALO ALTO : No residents injured despite extensive damage to Beech Street homes.
PALO ALTO : Power outage cripples area businesses, residents, affecting 28,000 customers for about 10 hours
