TRUCK SPILLED WHAT?
Ever heard the saying, “If you bought it, a truck brought it”? That’s all fine and good unless the truck failed to bring it.
BACKGROUND
Anecdotally, a cargo truck spilling its payload all over the road is pretty funny. (It definitely makes for good bathroom reading.) In reality, however, these accidents are much messier than they might seem on the surface—and costly, too. The trucking company loses a lot of money, as do those on the supplying and receiving ends. These accidents can also be very wasteful and in some cases cause damage to the environment. Then there’s the human cost—everything from traffic closures to injuries and deaths. But as much press as truck spills get (which is quite a lot), you can take solace in the fact that, out of the millions of cargo trucks navigating the world’s roadways every day, only a tiny fraction of them will ever crash. When they do, you can count on us to tell you all about it. Here are some spills involving trucks carrying food and beverages.
ENTREES
In November 2017, a Swedish truck carrying a load of meatballs on its way to pick up a load of potatoes (seriously) lost control on an icy patch and ended up on its side in a ditch. Part of the truck was blocking the road, and it couldn’t be moved until all 20 tons of meatballs were removed from the overturned trailer…by hand. It took all night.
In 2017 on I-30 in Arkansas, a semi hauling 30,000 frozen DiGiorno and Tombstone pizzas “split open” after the truck hit a bridge overpass. Frozen pizzas cascaded out, covering a huge swath of highway. Because the truck wasn’t blocking the road, motorists kept going, driving right over the spill area. Result: hundreds of flattened pizzas. Traffic was closed in both directions for four hours while workers picked up the thin-crust pizzas.
The press called it the “Ham Jam,” and it ruined a lot of Christmas dinners. The December 2013 crash occurred on a Georgia interstate when a truck driver rolled his rig while driving too fast up a curving on-ramp. When the truck tipped over, all 20 tons of Christmas hams—an estimated 12,000 servings’ worth—rolled out on the highway, causing a massive holiday backup.
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Of all the fish that get transported along Highway 101 on the Oregon coast, hagfish are by far the slimiest, which is why they’re known as “slime eels” or “snot eels.” In the sea, the thick slime acts as a defense against predators; on land, however, one of the only places it’s considered a food fish is South Korea, which is where 7,500 pounds of hagfish were going to be shipped in July 2017. But the load only made it as far as the Oregon town of Depoe Bay, where the truck driver stopped too late at a construction zone. When he slammed on his brakes, one barrel of hagfish went flying across the highway; the rest of the barrels slid off onto the road, causing four cars to crash. Hagfish ended up all over the place, covering the highway and several cars in a mass of mucus. Worse yet, the crash occurred during a heat wave, making the mess even smellier. It took bulldozers and high-powered hoses to clean up the slime.
One afternoon in March 2018, a cargo truck near Mellerud, Sweden, somehow lost its load of more than one hundred barrels of pickled herring. The barrels remained intact…until a car smashed through them, splattering the fish all over. When emergency crews arrived, they were perplexed. “I’m not really sure about the best way to clean herring,” Jonas Gustafsson told reporters. “Right now it’s very slippy.” Six months later, another Swedish truck driver lost a load of herring—this one caused by an elk that ran onto a busy highway. The driver managed to avoid hitting the animal, but in doing so, he tipped over the truck. “There’s herring on a 100-meter stretch of the road, and herring fillets in the ditch,” said an official. Workers had to remove all of the herring by hand while the elk grazed nearby.
VEGGIES
According to Truckspills.com (yes, there’s actually a website dedicated to this subject), “A truck hauling 50,000 pounds of soybeans overturned and dumped them into a 1995 Firebird in Clarksville, TN.”
Hordes of flaming avocados attacked motorists on a Texas highway in December 2017 after a cargo truck caught fire. Firefighters arrived, closed the road, and put out the avocados—all 20 tons of them. According to the Department of Agriculture, the avocados were worth around $50,000.
For more truck spills, drive (carefully!) over to page 280.
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