A semi-truck overturned on the 10 Freeway in California on Monday, spilling hundreds of gallons of syrup onto the road and snarling traffic for hours. As a result of the sticky situation, authorities closed the westbound lanes of the 10 Freeway in Fontana for nearly nine hours.
The accident occurred at Citrus Avenue around 11:20 a.m, according to the California Highway Patrol. CHP didn’t fully reopen the roadway until around 8 p.m. Monday night.
Removing the wrecked semi-truck went smoothly. Crews flipped it back upright and towed it away from the scene. The spilled syrup posed a much bigger problem, however. CBS News reports that the oozing syrup created an inch-thick layer of goo across all of the westbound lanes.
At first, Caltrans workers made several attempts to soak up the spilled syrup with absorbent material, but it proved too sticky. This difficulty with the cleanup led to a much longer closure than CHP officers had initially expected.
After those failed attempts, workers then called in a water truck to hose down the road. The crew then used a large vacuum attached to a truck to suck up the mess.
As all of this was going on, traffic sat at a standstill for miles. It’s unclear what led to the semi-truck overturning at the on-ramp.
Syrup is just the latest bizarre item to be spilled on a freeway
For some reason, whenever someone spills a large amount of an item on a freeway, it fascinates people. Why that happens is a mystery, but someone spilling syrup across a roadway is just the latest in a long list of strange things that have covered a highway in recent years.
Just last month, a semi-truck carrying a full load of liquid detergent crashed and overturned on an on-ramp to southbound Interstate 5 in California. They probably could have used that to help clean up the syrup. Strangely enough, a tractor-trailer hauling approximately 43,000 pounds of laundry detergent also overturned on Interstate 95 South in Virginia just a few days prior to that.
A few days before that, an overturned semi-truck crashed south of Waupun, Wisconsin, littering the highway with kegs of New Glarus beer.
Stuff like this happens all the time, and every time it does, people love to look. Whether it’s tomatoes and alfredo sauce, live lobsters, pizzas, or even cash, especially cash, it just never seems to get old.