As Hurricane Dorian approached South Carolina on Thursday, people on Myrtle Beach couldn’t help but stare — not at the hurricane but at the red Jeep Grand Cherokee that had been seemingly abandoned right on the beach.
The Jeep was driverless and stranded as it sat in the wind and high waters. Bystanders gathered around the vehicle. Some even stopped to pose for selfies with it.
And one person even brought out the bagpipes.
A lone bagpiper played “Amazing Grace” for the abandoned Jeep on Thursday, according to video posted by Timothy Kipp on Facebook.
The video has amassed more than 150,000 views as of Friday morning and been shared thousands of times.
But all joking aside, how did the Jeep end up on Myrtle Beach?
“My cousin has been around, he rides a motorcycle so I thought I’d let him borrow my Jeep because the weather has been so bad,” the owner of the vehicle, who did not want to be identified, told WMBF. "(Yesterday) morning he thought it would be cool to go on the beach and take a quick video of the sunrise before the storm came.”
Evidently, that was a poor decision.
“So he got on the beach and started driving it,” the owner of the Jeep said. “I guess there’s that runoff there and he didn’t realize it was in front of him, he was looking out the window when he went off and got stuck, which you can see he actually banged up the bumper a bit.”
He said that attempts to recover the Jeep were unsuccessful because of the weather conditions.
The Jeep was successfully removed from the beach Friday with the help of some heavy construction equipment, bringing #JeepWatch2019 to an end.
