Man escapes early morning car fire on Oak Street unharmed
A young electrical apprentice and vintage car enthusiast is safe after escaping an early morning car fire on Oak Street, but the project he worked for several months was destroyed in the fire on Wednesday morning.
Spencer Zaleschuk was driving to work in his 1971 Volkswagen Beetle around 6:20 a.m. Wednesday, when he started to notice a loss of power as he was shifting gears.
"All of a sudden out of my rear view mirror, I see a bunch of flames," said Zaleschuk.
"Honestly I wasn't super surprised because this is a pretty common thing, but I was still really annoyed because I've been working on this car for a long time."
Car was a project
Zaleschuk said he bought the old Volkswagen Beetle in October 2016 and rebuilt the engine from scratch. He said got the engine running just less than a month ago.
"I actually split the engine in half," he said. "It's been a long project, I was really happy to see it running … I'm really annoyed."
Luckily, Zaleschuk escaped without injury. One of his co-workers saw the fire and pulled over to give him a ride to work shortly after.
The fire also forced traffic on Oak Street to just one lane going northbound for a number of hours.
