Monday, November 7, 2011 The firefighter who was the driver of a $400,000 tanker totaled during a single-vehicle accident over the weekend has been cited for careless driving, according to a police report filed Monday.

Both Lewis Moore Jr., 47, of Califon and an unidentified 16-year-old juvenile passenger in the vehicle were hospitalized following the wreck, but neither suffered life-threatening injuries, authorities said.
Township police responded to the area of Allen and Somerville roads a little after 11 a.m. Sunday to find the Pottersville Volunteer Fire Company’s 1985 Chevrolet tanker overturned a few hundred feet west of the intersection, with water leaking from an external tank, according to the police report. No one was trapped inside, but the driver, Moore, and the juvenile were walking near the side of the road and “appeared to be in a daze,” the report indicated.
Moore subsequently told an investigating officer that he had been at a fire department training drill with multiple other departments on nearby Mountainview Road when he was asked to respond to an active brush fire in neighboring Far Hills, according to police. With the tanker’s overhead lights and siren activated, Moore said he was driving on Allen Road when he approached the intersection, ran a stop sign at a four-way stop and then “realized he was going too fast,” the report indicated.
The tanker hit a bump in the roadway, causing the front end to become airborne, then started fishtailing out of control, ultimately tipping over onto the driver’s side in the opposite lane of travel, briefly rolling onto its roof and finally coming to a stop on the passenger’s side. A driver heading in the opposite direction at the time told authorities he managed to “narrowly drive around the truck” as it careened into his lane of travel, according to police.
Moore managed to radio a report of the accident to dispatch, and he and the juvenile passenger were transported to Morristown Memorial Hospital for treatment of multiple scrapes and lacerations to their arms, authorities said.