Semi-truck crashes and the clean-up efforts that follow are rarely mundane. We’ve seen wrecked trucks spill supercars, beer, and fireworks over the past couple of years, but crews in Texas were recently dispatched to clean up an even more unusual spill: millions of newly minted dimes. The incident happened on Highway 287 in Alvord, a town located about an hour northwest of Dallas. The driver veered off the road, overcorrected, and rolled. The trailer flipped with the truck and spilled roughly $800,000 in dimes onto the road. Why the truck was carrying so many dimes and where the load was headed isn’t clear, but the spill caused one annoying mess. Cleaning up the spill required deploying huge vacuum cleaners mounted on trucks and numerous workers equipped with shovels, rakes, and other garden tools. Some workers even ended up painstakingly picking up the dimes one at a time by hand and dumping them into one of the vacuum cleaners. The wreck and the clean-up effort that followed shut down the highway for hours, with crews still on location picking up coins well into the evening. The truck driver and a passenger escaped with non-life-threatening injuries.
