A tidal wave of crap...

While most of you were sleeping off the usual Sunday night party, I had to work today. Mostly against my will, but someone has to do it and if it's not me it literally isn't going to be anyone else.

I noticed some unusually heavy traffic flow on the road into town and I heard some rumblings of a tractor-trailer accident up on the main highway just outside of the city limits while I was waiting for our beloved Memorial Day parade to start. I snapped off a few photos and got another "grip and grin" photo that was so rudely scheduled for 10 a.m. on a national holiday and then I was off to see what the accident was.

As it turns out, the local landfill is a popular facility for not only our own garbage, but most everyone else's garbage in the southern states and eastern seaboard.

This particular semi was on it's way up from Nashville. It was carrying what is commonly referred to as sludge. While sludge is a pretty loose term since oil and grease is sometimes referred to as sludge, in this particular instance "sludge" was a somewhat nicer term for raw human sewage.

What caused this particular accident that ended with a large amount of "sludge" washing over the highway was that the driver apparently wasn't paying as much attention to the car in front of him as he should have. On that particular stretch of road it's mostly residential even though it is a busy highway. I'm sure he never assumed that anyone would stop and turn into one of the houses.

Come to find out, one person did in fact have to stop and turn into one of the houses or perhaps the oddly placed carpet outlet just south of town.

Since he wasn't paying very much attention, the driver had to brake very hard to try and keep his truck and its contents from becoming one with the passenger vehicle ahead of him.

This is the point in the story where everyone assumes that the truck jack knifes out of control and causes a horrendous crash, but this is not the case.

You see when he slammed on his brakes the contents of his trailer, being somewhat semi-solid and fluid-like, had the natural tendency to shift forward very rapidly. This is something that is expected to happen when a hard braking incident occurs.

However, when your trailer full of raw human sewage has nothing enclosing its top, it becomes a tidal wave of crap.