Overheating brakes sparked a fire that overcooked 15 tons of TV dinners.
Nearly every time we drive, we’re sharing the road with semi trucks. As we pass by in the left lane, we often wonder what they’re hauling mere feet away from us.
What is contained within the expansive aluminum trailers they tow is almost always a mystery. Occasionally, though, we find out in the worst way possible when a wreck or a malfunction causes the cargo to scatter across the highway.
That’s what happened early last Wednesday morning, according to KCRA NBC 3 Sacramento. The accident occurred on I-80 westbound near Placer County, California. A semi truck’s brakes overheated, causing a chain reaction that resulted in the refrigerated trailer catching fire and spilling 30,000 pounds of frozen TV dinners across the California highway.
Traffic was diverted and the road was shut down for several hours while Caltrans used heavy equipment to clean up the massive mess of meals, which spilled over both westbound lanes of I-80. The road was cleaned up and reopened around 11 AM that same morning.
Thankfully, no one was injured as a result of the fire. What’s also good news is that the incident happened in the early morning hours, so it was less inconvenient to motorists than if it had happened, say, at dinnertime. At least in that situation the gridlocked motorists would have had something to eat, although we’re guessing the roasted TV dinners were a bit overdone.
Out of curiosity, we looked up various frozen dinners by weight, and came to the conclusion that each dinner weighs about 10 ounces on average. That means there were about 48,000 TV dinners in the trailer – enough to feed just over 1,700 families of four for a week. That’s a ton of food any way you slice it – or, more appropriately, 15 tons.
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