When a pickup veered off the Arlington Memorial Bridge Thursday night and plunged into the frigid waters below, emergency personnel in Washington scrambled to save the driver.

The District of Columbia’s fire and emergency medical services department has a boat for situations just like this, but instead of clearing a channel through the icy Potomac River, it was more than 200 miles away by water. The John H. Glenn Jr., the fire department’s lone ice-breaking ship, has been moored to a repair dock in Baltimore since at least the fall of 2022.

The driver of the pickup truck — whose identity has not been publicly released — died after spending roughly an hour in the water, authorities said.

Crews used airboats capable of moving over ice on the river to reach the victim; D.C. Fire and EMS Chief John A. Donnelly Sr. said they are “designed and purchased specifically for this type of operation.”

“The airboats are the quickest way to get to the scene,” Donnelly told reporters at a press conference Thursday night. “An ice-breaking operation takes a long time to perform, so the airboats are the right tool for this job.”

The pickup truck fell into the river around 7 p.m. Thursday after colliding with another vehicle on the bridge, which links Washington to Virginia. Two people from the second vehicle, which remained on the bridge, had minor injuries, according to the D.C. fire and EMS department.

Recent winters in the nation’s capital have been warmer than historic averages. But frigid temperatures this winter created a layer of ice at the site of Thursday’s incident.

A source with knowledge of the situation said the John Glenn has been at the General Ship Repair Corp. since June 2022, and that — following the fatal incident Thursday — fire department officials came to Baltimore Friday to see their ice-breaker.

An executive at the repair company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Satellite images show the John Glenn has been in Baltimore since at least October of 2022 and can be seen in photos docked near the Key Highway, next to Domino Sugar.

Historical satellite imagery shows the vessel in dry dock, presumably for repairs, in 2022. But images from 2023 and onward show it refloated and moored to a pier.

The ship is nearly 63 years old. First launched in 1962 for the New York City Fire Department, the District of Columbia purchased the ship in the 1970s. It was retrofitted in the ’80s as an ice-breaking ship after an airliner crashed into the 14th Street Bridge over the Potomac in January 1982 and icy conditions prohibited the Glenn’s crew from making rescues. The crash of the Air Florida jet left 78 dead, including four people in cars.

This is not the first time the D.C. fireboat has spent time in a Baltimore shipyard.

In 2009, the Glenn was involved in an accident when a dinner cruise ship crashed into it while it was docked at the fireboat facility. The dinner cruise ship, more than twice the length of the Glenn, tore a hole in the fireboat’s hull and D.C. fire officials described the damage as “considerable.”

The Glenn spent far less time in Baltimore then, with the repair work being completed by the end of that March, according to a report from the D.C. inspector general.

The Maryland Port Administration, which oversees the Port of Baltimore, does not have an ice-breaking boat, according to spokesman Richard Scher. But both the U.S. Coast Guard and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources have ice-breaking boats.

The Baltimore City Fire Department has three fire-fighting boats, according to its website.

The region around Washington has been experiencing freezing temperatures and snow this winter with even colder weather on the way next week. Forecasts of bitter-cold temperatures have prompted officials to move President-elect Donald Trump’s swearing-in to inside the U.S. Capitol on Monday.