…but I’d suspect a fuel pump shut off somehow got triggered.
That could indeed be an issue with vehicles taken off-road.
It came to my full attention, some years ago, when I was diagnosing a fuel pump issue on my 1997 Contour. I traced the circuit all the way from the fusebox under the hood, back to the fuel pump itself. I'd had some faint awareness that modern cars had an impact-triggered cutoff to the fuel pump, to shut it down in the event of a collision, but this is the first time I actually saw it and gained true awareness of it. In the Contour, it's just ahead of the driver door.
It's only supposed to be trigger if there's a hard enough impact to suggest that the car may have been in a bad enough collision to rupture a fuel line or part of the fuel system, to keep the pump from pumping fuel out through that rupture; but I could see a very real possibility that in a vehicle taken off-road, it might be triggered by more normal activities. It'd probably be a very good idea for every owner of any off-road vehicle to know where this cutoff switch is, and how to reset it.
In the case of my Contour, no, that switch hadn't been triggered, at least not until I started tinkering with it, experimenting to see how it triggered, and how to reset it. It was the fuel pump itself that had gone bad, and needed to be replaced.
May the Ford be with you, always.
On Order: Badlands 4-door 2.7, Lux Package, Velocity Blue, non-Sasquatch