The Mac’s convenience store at 2515 Hemlock Street had an unexpected door-crasher special on Wednesday (May 15th) morning in the form of a speeding Buick.

At this point there are no indications of injures after the white sedan crashed through the store’s front entrance, some time around 10 a.m.

At 10:30 a.m. the car could be seen with its front end inside the store.

It hit the plate glass window to the left of the entrance, taking out both the window and one of the entrance doors.

“Let’s hit the Mac’s on Hemlock”

There was no sense of emergency when I was taking photos of the accident. A woman and a man could be seen calmly chatting with firefighters while other emergency responders stood around.

One fellow wearing a safety vest marked “City of Vancouver” appeared to be taking photos of the car with his phone.

And while there was a police cruiser parked at the scene, no police officers were visible.

I cannot say if either or both the man and woman I saw were involved in the crash but a homeless peer told me that when he had walked by the Mac’s some minutes earlier, a woman had been sitting in the car, on the driver’s side.

Details are limited to what could be seen because emergency responders were too occupied to discuss the accident.

Beyond any injuries, it is also unknown if this was the outcome of a collision with another vehicle or simply a parking attempt gone spectacularly awry.

Whatever the cause, the car, a Buick Century, had enough velocity that all four of its wheels jumped over the concrete parking curb stops parallel to the entrance walkway of the small strip mall where the Mac’s is located, on the southwest corner of the intersection of West Broadway and Hemlock Street.

This crash may end up simply inconveniencing regular customers and management of the 24-hour convenience store. (It will have to close, after all, for some amount of time to have the glass and aluminum entrance replaced.)

If there really were no injures, the fact will owe as much to the time of day as any other sort of luck.

There is normally a table and seating where the car’s two front wheels came to rest inside the store. This is frequently occupied—especially in the evening—by customers. (It is a good spot from which watch the Keno and lottery numbers on the in-store TV.)

Also in the evening, there is almost always one of a number of homeless panhandlers standing or sitting exactly where the car hit the store.

If, on this morning, there was no panhandler in the path of the car—either standing and opening the door for customers, or sitting quietly and reading—it was only because the day manager does not allow panhandlers to work the entrance.

Update: As of 2:27 p.m., the Buick had been cleared away and—notwithstanding the the yellow caution tape strung across the entrance, or the smashed window glass—the Mac’s was still open for business.

A steady trickle of customers could be seen gawking at the damage and variously shimmying under, or climbing over, the yellow tape to get in and out of the store.

And the clerk behind the counter ringing up the purchases told me emphatically that the store had no intention of closing its doors, which is understandable, I guess, given that only one of the doors was still on its hinges.