[namllihs]

After seeing the thread by Sawdust on a truck crash. I remembered some shots I had..

About once a month I act as Highways duty officer for Leicestershire County Council. This involves attending out of hours highway emergencies, such as RTA's.
This one failed to make it round a roundabout , it's load of concentrated apple juice spilt onto the carriageway and got into the surface water drainage system.






Fire crew cleaning up.




Photographer from the local paper.

This one also failed to negotiate a roundabout and it's load of doors ended up in a farmers field.


Luckily no-one was seriously injured in either of these accidents.

all taken last year with Fuji S602Z.
I always carry a camera with me nowadays, and it is useful for recording the scene. The main purpose of being duty officer is to co-ordinate the different agencies, and minimise the disruption to other road users.
With the apple juice truck I had to organise the road closure and diversion, a gritter vehicle was required to sand the road to absorb the juice, the water course had to be stopped up to prevent contamination, a gully emptier was required to pump out the road gullies, the environment agency were informed and sent an officer out to check what we had done. when the truck had been towed away we had a road sweeper to sweep up the sand and debris, before the road could be re-opened. about five and a half hours. and then I got a call to close a road because of a factory fire.

[Markulous]

A good record of the events following the RTA

Am I alone in wondering why such an enormous resource was diverted to this accident? It's apple juice, not some highly toxic contaminant! As a microbiologist, I'm not aware of any deadly disease (or even spore) spread by the humble apple. "Granny Smith wipes out entire community" might be a potential headline, I guess!

Not having a go at you as I'd guess there are procedures that must be followed - but it does baffle me in these times when we should carefully consider any action for it's potential wastefulness, if only for the 'carbon content'

Rant over! And apologies for hijacking your thread!

[namllihs]

No problem, the procedures would have been the same for almost any load, as the road was impassable to traffic until the load had been transferred, the lorry righted and towed away and the debris cleared, the E.A. involvement was to assess the impact on the watercourses into which the gullies outfall.
The worst load I ever had to deal with was chicken offal on a summers day with temps of 70 degrees that was smelly