Trolley fire near Forsyth Park in downtown Savannah

SAVANNAH, GA (WTOC) - A trolley tour bus caught fire near Forsyth Park in downtown Savannah on Friday, leaving some tourists and locals on edge.

It is believed to have been an electrical fire in the engine compartment. Everyone on the trolley made it off safe and no injuries were reported.

Many people we spoke with who witnessed the trolley go up in flames say they didn’t expect to see anything like that, especially on vacation.

“You can see the flames and smoke, and the people in the back of the bus could’ve clearly been injured. Our bus was next to that bus at first,” one person said.

Patty Mefford and her friend Joanne Sacchetti are vacationing in Savannah and were just a few feet away from the fire.

“We took a trolley to a hop on, hop off tour, and we got next to a bus - another trolley tour - and my friend Joanne noticed smoke coming out of it,” Mefford said.

“The bus was stopped, so then our driver pulled up beside the other bus to see what was happening, and the other bus driver was sitting, looking at the smoke coming out of the engine, and so our driver stopped, and I said, ‘there’s smoke and there’s fire out of there,’ so we told our driver to move away from that bus,” Sacchetti said.

“It was a little unnerving because we didn’t know if the bus was going to explode. There were people on there. We were pretty shaken. It was kind of a small street, so we didn’t want to get trapped next to it.”

“People started to evacuate, and then the flames got larger and our bus driver got a fire extinguisher and started putting it out, and another person started coming up, and it was like a Southern barbecue.”

WTOC has reached out to Old Savannah Tours, who declined to comment at this time.

Below is our Facebook Live feed from the scene.

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