In a morbidly fascinating accident, a truck loaded with more than 150,000 tomatoes reportedly collided with a highway median, causing all the tomatoes to disperse across the busy lanes of Interstate 80 in California on Monday. The spillage had caused havoc for the highway police, as they were presented with the daunting task of cleaning up all the mess. Not only this, just a day after this bizarre incident, California was faced with another extraordinary accident. A semi-truck knocked down various jars containing Alfredo sauce on the busy roads in Tennessee.
Talking about the tomato spillage, the truck carrying those juicy tomatoes first collided with a vehicle and then with the median highway. More specifically, the incident happened on Monday morning in Vacaville, California. The New York Times reported that the reason for the dispersion of tomatoes across several lanes is due to the fact that the truck first collided with the vehicle, resulting in a more damaging situation. On the other hand, the rest of the drivers, who were unaware of this spillage, began to continuously drive through the lanes, thus crushing the tomatoes even harder.
Due to this, the other vehicles coming this way started to lose control as the roads were filled with tomato juice spread all over. Moreover, the incident spurred considerable damage as one person broke his leg, whereas the truck driver and two other people succumbed to minor injuries. While discussing these statistics, California Highway Patrol Officer Jason Tyhurst further said that such types of incidents are really dangerous for the general population and can easily cause a fatality. Fortunately, this incident didn’t involve any deaths or casualties, although there was a strong probability of it.
Coupled with this, the California Highway Patrol closed the highway for several hours for the sake of the safety of the general public. As per the report from the Los Angeles Times, “The tomatoes were cleaned up from the eastbound lanes by 11:30 a.m. Monday morning, more than six hours after the crash. Crews used an absorbent powder to clean up the greasy dirt, tomato, and oil mixture. However, one westbound lane remained closed until about 3 p.m. as clean-up crews worked to remove the semi-truck.”
To that end, Tyhurst said that such types of accidents mostly happen on less busy roads, like this one that happened in Solano County, which is also renowned as being a major producer of tomatoes. Hence, the incident got the highway police exhausted due to its messiness, but at last, the roads were opened and normal traffic was resumed.