So there I was at somewhere around 5AM, wondering if sleep was ever going to be an option, when a distant but authoritative “WHAM” echoed through the house. “Huh,” I says, and go back to scribbling. A little while later the sound of approaching sirens, so, being male, I went to the front door to watch the emergency vehicles zip by in the dark. I noticed that they stopped not far up the road. So I wandered up that way to see what was doing.
D’oh.
What we got here: a 90-degree bend in the road (north-south to east-west) with an agricultural ditch running north-south, just east of the N-S leg of the road, passing underneath the E-W leg. Concrete barrier blocks *used* to wall off the ditch on the northern side of the road. Some of those barrier blocks are now at the bottom of the sea, along with a quarter of the truck.
This corner has been trouble before. But a new wrinkle was added this time. It has not rained in months; this is not exaggeration: September has seen *no* measurable precipitation. It was probably sometime in early June that the rain last fell and actually made it to the ground. As a consequence, the road has been covered with dust, dirt, tire rubber and leaked oil for months without any way to wash it off. And Tuesday the remnants of hurricane Rosa started to hit the area, dumping rain down with some seriousness. Wednesday was clear, but by evening it started raining again… not powerfully, but non-stop. So all that lubricant that had been deposited on the road all summer was *finally* getting slowly lifted off. But it’s a gradual process, and while it’s going on it’s almost like the road is covered in soap. So, here comes a truck. I don’t know the course of the event, but it can be guessed fairly clearly. So once again, exciting doin’s in downtown Thatcher, Utah.
I suspect the state environmental people are going to be thrilled that a truck went for a swim in a fast-flowing ag ditch, bringing all its oil and gasoline and radiator coolant with it…
Apparently the truck had one occupant, not seriously hurt.