One person was in custody and a manhunt was underway for two others early Friday after a vehicle fleeing police crashed into a water treatment plant in northwest Atlanta.
The Infiniti sport utility vehicle ended up nose down in a concrete “mixing basin” filled with about 15 feet of untreated river water at the city’s Hemphill plant.
The incident began after an officer on patrol spotted the SUV traveling down Howell Mill Road with no lights around 4 a.m.
“The officer did a u-turn to conduct a traffic stop for the headlight violation,” Atlanta police Sgt. Ailen Mitchell said.
“The vehicle did stop, and the officer began to run the tag, and that’s when the vehicle took off, traveling down Howell Mill,” Mitchell told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It looks like the driver lost control, went through the grass and over the fence into the water treatment center.”
As the officer got out and walked up to the fence to see if anyone was injured, “three people got out of the vehicle and took off,” he said.
“One swam and the other two jumped over the concrete barricades and ran through the water treatment center trying to get away,” Mitchell said.
He said the officer apprehended the driver of the vehicle, but the other two got away.
“We have K9 units out here and other officers that have set up a perimeter to locate the other two,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell said that after jumping a concrete wall and ripping down a long stretch of chain link fence, the SUV dropped about 15 feet straight down into the water.
“The front end and a little bit of the passenger compartment was submerged in the water, but the back end was out of the water,” he said.
Glennis Curry, communications manager for the city’s Department of Watershed Management, said plant operations continued uninterrupted.
“The basin where the car landed has been isolated and will be drained,” Curry said. “We’re still pulling water from another basin that serves the same purpose and water treatment will continue as normal.”
Mitchell said the Infiniti had not been reported stolen.
The SUV’s driver, 29-year-old DeNorris Hoard, was charged with damage to city property and several traffic charges, Atlanta police spokeswoman Kim Jones said Friday afternoon, adding that his two passengers remained at large.
Howell Mill Road was shut down in both directions just west of 17th Street as authorities tried to figure out how to pull the vehicle out of the basin. Just before 7 a.m., a heavy duty wrecker hoisted the car up and out of the water.
The bizarre incident left veteran officers and firefighters shaking their heads.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mitchell said.
But as strange as the crash was, “actually, this has happened before,” Curry said.
“I don’t have the date of when it happened before, but there is precedent,” he said. “It was pretty much the same scenario – a car hit the fence, broke it down and went into this basin. We isolated the basin and kept operations going.”
Staff photographer John Spink contributed to this article.
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