TRUCK SPILLED WHAT?
On page 84, we told you about some messy and costly spills involving trucks carrying food. Just in case you haven’t had your fill, here are some more. (You might want a bib.)
SAUCES AND SIDES
If you think spaghetti sauce is hard to clean out of a plastic container, imagine cleaning hundreds of broken jars of the stuff off a grassy median. The sauce crash occurred at 3:00 a.m. on an Arkansas highway because the truck driver was “distracted by his GPS device” and left the road. Then he overcorrected, drove into the median, and rolled over. Out came the sauce. The driver was briefly trapped but didn’t suffer any major injuries.
In March 2018, a truck full of frozen McDonald’s french fries veered off an embankment and overturned in Irvine, California. Despite the severity of the crash, the driver (who may have fallen asleep) was uninjured. The same can’t be said for the fries—not even ketchup could save them.
BEVERAGES
In 2008 a truck hauling hundreds of 12-packs of Keystone Light beer failed to negotiate a curve on I-70 in Colorado, and tipped over. According to Lisa Stigall of the Wheat Ridge Police Department, most of the beers were “uninjured,” but there were thousands of cans spread over a wide area. It took dozens of people several hours to pick up all that beer (and judging from news photos, not all the beer picker-uppers worked for the Department of Transportation).
The Trans-Canada Highway was closed for 10 hours one night in 2014 after the driver of a wine truck crossed the median near Hope, British Columbia, and collided with a truck carrying pulp. Neither driver was injured, but thousands of bottles of wine exploded, creating a mess of wine, glass, and pulp that took workers an entire night to clean up.
A terrible accident occurred in 2018 when two tractor-trailers collided on I-40 in Arkansas. No one was seriously injured, but it looked really bad: one of the trucks burst into flames and sent a fireball into the sky. The other truck lost its entire load…of Fireball Whisky.
It’s simple physics: if a tanker hauling 30,000 pounds of milk veers to the right shoulder, then swerves left, and then swerves right again, the momentum of all that liquid will continue moving to the left. That’s what happened on Highway 34 in Iowa in June 2018. Result: the tanker slid on its side for 200 yards, leaving a sea of spilt milk in its wake. (No crying was reported.)
About 3% of Antarctic glacier “ice” is actually penguin urine.
DESSERT
May 15 is “National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day.” Coincidentally, May 15, 2018, was also the day a cargo truck was speeding down Highway 17 in North Carolina when the back doors came open and 20 large tubs of raw chocolate chip cookie dough came rolling out. It didn’t cause a wreck, but it did leave a sticky mess on the hot asphalt that took all day to remove.
Also in May 2018, 12 tons of liquid chocolate came gushing out of an overturned tanker in western Poland. By the time the truck was removed from the roadway, the chocolate had hardened in the midday sun. It was slicker than ice. Traffic was backed up both ways for several hours while workers used blasts of hot water to melt the chocolate, and bulldozers to scrape it up.
Someone—it’s unclear who—was hauling a load of cupcakes, cookies, and bread on I-95 through Palmyra, Maine, in November 2013, when the pastries fell out and blocked one entire lane. A moment later, a motorist, David Morrison, approached the scene in his Toyota minivan and slowed down. But the driver directly behind him, Jonathan Marquis in a Ford Explorer, couldn’t stop in time. He collided with Morrison and his Explorer rolled over, sending Marquis to the hospital with cuts and bruises. Morrison was uninjured, but the two vehicles were a tangled mess. Officials were unable to track down whoever lost the baked goods. According to news reports, police believe “somebody was hauling a load of pastry either for use by a hunter as bear bait or by a farmer to feed pigs.”
Now that you’ve had your fill of food truck disasters, set your GPS for page 426 to find out what happens when other things—cash, yard waste, missiles—end up all over the road.
The first alarm clock, invented in 1787 by a New Hampshire clockmaker who liked to get up early, could only be set to go off at 4 a.m.