A Texas highway was shut down all day after nearly $800,000 worth of dimes burst free after an 18-wheeler overturned around 5:30 a.m. Tuesday. Video shows work crews painstakingly clearing the dimes off the side of US 287 in Alvord, a cleanup effort that took around 14 hours. The Texas Department of Public Safety said the spillage occurred when the driver veered off the roadway and overcorrected, causing the truck to roll onto its side.
The roadway ended up being closed until approximately 7 p.m. as workers used shovels and brooms and shop vacs to suck up the deluge of 10-cent pieces. Video even showed one worker picking them up by hand one by one. The cleanup effort even deployed what appear to be leaf-sucking trucks to hoover up the errant coins, photos taken at the scene show.
I read three or four articles on this to get background for the post. Not a single one of them questioned why nearly a million bucks of coins was being transported in an open tractor trailer. That to me is the most fascinating part of this story.
Juss' sayin'...
LOVE your reference to Blazing Saddles!
ReplyDeleteBack in the 70's when I was in high school my dad owned a juke box/pool table/pinball/video game rental business. Dad and his 2 man crew would empty the change boxes and weigh the bag. Dad would split half the proceeds by weight. We had a coin roller that would roll up 50 quarters in 4 turns of the handle. I could watch TV doing it. I worked for him for an hour to two hours 5 nights a week rolling quarters. I always had a roll in my pocket. BTW: a thousand dollars of quarters weights 50 pounds. We turned $1500 to $3k a week with most weeks in the low $2k range.
ReplyDeleteMy local small town bank has a change counter and does it for free. I used to always have change but with the use of a credit card instead of cash that has been reduced to next to nothing. And yes, I pay it all off at the end of the month. With a check.
ReplyDelete