No one thought a highway food accident would ever top the Anheuser-Busch–Frito-Lay snackcident. Then a deli-meat truck hit a bread truck in New Jersey. And yet neither can compare to yesterday’s accident on Arkansas’s Interstate 30, when an 18-wheeler crashed and spilled hundreds of frozen pizzas onto the road.
The good news — aside from the pizza — is that no one was hurt in the accident. “Fortunately it did not turn into a horrendous disaster,” Arkansas DOT spokesman Danny Straessle told Arkansas Online. “Except for the loss of the pizza, I guess.”
The accident did cause traffic to back up almost ten miles, and the freeway was closed for four-and-a-half hours as authorities cleaned up the mess. Unfortunately, pizza wasn’t the only thing they were cleaning. The truck’s trailer was ripped open, spilling diesel fuel all over the road and onto the pizzas, some of which were in turn run over by cars.
Tractors were called in to scoop up the pizzas and load them into dump trucks, while others outfitted with vacuums and mechanical brooms cleaned up the cheese, pepperoni, and sauce smearing the pavement. The only positive side effect? The scene of the accident, Straessle says, started to smell like a pizzeria. Oh, and this video of tractors scooping up frozen pizzas off a highway.
