Highway A Sweet Mess After 40,000 Pounds Of Liquid Chocolate Spills From Tanker

Though the resulting aroma was sweet, the rollover accident that caused a tanker truck to spill 40,000 pounds of hot, liquid chocolate on an Arizona freeway was anything but. There were no injuries or other vehicles involved in the accident, but the insurance impact is likely significant.

The accident appeared to have been caused by a structural failure as a latch that connects the truck with the trailer became detached, according to the Arizona Department of Public Safety. The Department and others were able to clean up the spilled chocolate quickly, unlike firefighters who had to use shovels, hot water and torches to remove a ton of hardened chocolate from a German roadway last month following a storage tank malfunction at a Westonnen chocolate factory.

Large truck accidents regularly create messes on U.S. and Canadian highways. The past few weeks have seen an overturned truck dump more than 40,000 pounds of frozen chicken tenders on Route 35 in Alabama; a tanker spill 50,000 liters of jet fuel onto a Toronto-area highway; and a tractor-trailer rollover in New York deposit so many cases of canned goods and other household items on I-88 that one lane was closed for 11 hours to clean up spilled cargo and fuel.

During the last two months of 2018 alone, an overturned tanker spilled 1,500 gallons of used cooking oil onto a highway in Pennsylvania; a trailer loaded with Christmas trees overturned on a Michigan roadway; and a Christmas Eve accident caused a FedEx truck to dump packages onto I-95 in Massachusetts.

The U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) 2017 Pocket Guide for Large Truck and Bus Statistics indicates more than 8.4 million single-unit trucks and nearly 2.8 million combination, or trailer-tractors, were involved in accidents in 2015.

Insurance can help cover the costs of incidents like the Arizona chocolate spill, where factors beyond a driver’s control are the cause, said Steve Shepard, Underwriting Manager, Transportation, Burns & Wilcox, Indianapolis, Indiana. However, who pays for the damage and cleanup is not always clear.

“There could be a few lines (of insurance) or multiple lines involved here,” Shepard said. “Even without bodily injuries the costs could be significant. Our goal is always to make sure clients are properly insured while still being able to make money in their business.”

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