The Western Washington area is famous for many things – Mount Rainier, Pike Place Market, orcas – but it may be becoming known for something less glamorous: semitrailer spills with unexpected materials.
Here are six incident from the past few years.
1. Beenado
A semitrailer carrying a load of honey bees overturned on northbound Interstate 5 in Lynnwood in April 2015, scattering boxes containing nearly 14 million live bees across the highway.
KIRO 7 News video showed dozens of boxes of live bees scattered across the road. Beekeepers from the company that owns the bees, Belleville Bees in Burlingon, responded and used smoke to calm the bees and get them back into boxes and loaded onto trucks.
2. Crabpocalypse
On April 5 in 2016, drivers waited four hours for one lane to open and seven hours for both northbound lanes to flow on the Alaskan Way Viaduct after a semitrailer overturned and spilled frozen crab all over the viaduct.
The driver of the semitrailer was cited for negligent driving and received a $550 ticket.
The so-called crabpocalypse occurred nearly a year after a toppled fish truck snarled traffic on the same road. This brings us to …
3. The fish truck incident
Drivers waited nearly nine hours behind stalled viaduct traffic in March 2015 after a semitrailer tipped over and dumped salmon all over the road.
4. Spools gets stuck in the viaduct
Not quite a spill, but the accident just weeks after the fish truck incident, created a traffic nightmare when a spool was jammed in the viaduct.
5. Human waste
An overturned semi spilled human waste all over the roadway on the southbound Interstate 5 onramp to Highway 2 in April 2016.
6. It’s bananas
No, really, in 2016 a semitrailer carrying a load 22.5 tons of bananas overturned in Skagit County near Bow, Washington.
The bananas were cleaned up in about two hours.
So why does this keep happening?
There hasn’t been an official reason for why these bizarre accidents keep happening.
What we do know is that it's no secret that Washington state does have some rough roads. Though officials have not connected these accidents with rough roads, a <a href="http://www.kiro7.com/news/rough-roads-worst-spots-and-whats-being-done-about/27057409">KIRO 7 News investigation</a> found that, as of fall 2015, the state's backlog of paving roads is 3,000 lane miles.
In 2013, the Washington State Department of Transportation classified 76.6 percent of its pavement as good or very good, 16.7 percent as fair, and 6.7 percent as poor or very poor.
How is this being fixed?
The fish truck incident prompted a new traffic-response plan.
New thinking calls for officers to get vehicles involved in collisions out of the way, without worrying about damaging them.
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