Accidents happen. But when this driver tipped his truck, he serendipitously created a vibrant street mural. Residents looked on with awe that forgot all about toxic spills and the environment.
Only slightly injured, the Brazilian truck driver had taken a turn too quickly and, loaded down with 4 tons of paint, the momentum overcame his truck. Streaks of colorful paint streamed down this Manaus freeway ramp, in effect, reinventing street art as we know it.
Timber!
This truck lumbered toward disaster sending planks of wood in every direction. The tractor-trailer was hauling 90,000 pounds of lumber when the driver dozed off and barreled into a rock cliff. Interstate 96 in Sidney, Maine was shut down for hours.
This lumber spill happened on July 29, 2015, but it happens more often than you'd like to think. Just a week earlier there was a lumber spill on the New Jersey Turnpike. On Feb. 6, 2020, another one tangled traffic in Massachusetts. A crash in Pennsylvania happened on Dec. 4, 2017, and in January of 2020, another lumber spill in Jasper County, South Carolina occurred.
Holy Mackerel, Batman!
A fish lorry driving through Belfast in January of 2015 managed to dump an entire shipment of mackerel. Six hundred fish poured out onto Ravenhill Road, and the driver just drove on. He may not have even known he lost his shipment, according to responders.
Locals were at the scene harvesting the huge catch while city officials warned that reaping the bounty could be dangerous, calling the fish "unfit for human consumption." Tommy Bardsley told The Belfast Telegraph that he scooped up 25 fish. "It's all fresh fish, I'll have some for dinner and freeze the rest," Mr. Bardsley said. Tommy added that he was certain that the fish were just off the boat. Luckily, city street cleaners got rid of the rest before the stench overwhelmed the area.
Quite a Scramble!
You can order eggs over easy, but these eggs got flipped. This is what happens when 136,000 eggs slide off of a tractor-trailer. It happened last year in Pennsylvania when a trucker was transporting a delivery of fertilized eggs to an incubation facility. Instead, 2,260 gallons of egg yolks poured over the highway when the 66-year-old driver cut a turn too close, launching crates of chicken eggs.
The crazy thing is he drove on, not realizing he lost over a hundred thousand eggs. It took several hours and 20,000 gallons of water to clean it up. The incident pictured above happened in China in 2018. It took two hours to clean the highway.
The Pavement of Chocolate!
It looks like a scene out of Willy Wonka's world but actually it is the A2 highway in Poland coated with 12 tons of chocolate. The cleanup was complicated. The chocolate, in the cool late spring morning, hardened before it could be washed away. All six lanes of the Slupca highway in Western Poland were drenched in this liquid goodness.
The fire crew was called in and said it was more difficult than snow to remove once it hardened and trickier to clean up than an oil spill. The crews had to find hot water to spray on the enormous road-sized chocolate bar to melt it away and wash it into the gutters.