I read with rather horrified amusement about a traffic problem in Fargo that occurred on July 11th. The incident took place on I-94 on the border between Fargo and West Fargo on a very busy section of the highway. The exits on that stretch of the highway lead to major retail areas and the big Sanford Hospital.
As in many communities there is a lot of construction this summer happening in Fargo. The eastbound lanes on I-94 were reduced to one lane for construction. The police and highway patrol got calls around 2:30 pm that there was a complete blockage of the one eastbound lane by debris that had fallen out of a truck.
A trucker had apparently braked suddenly for slowing traffic not realizing that the rear door to the trailer he was hauling had opened. Approximately 15 well aged bison carcasses slid out of the trailer onto the highway. The trucker seemingly didn’t know what had happened and continued driving east. He wasn’t identified until 7 hours later. It is thought he was heading to a rendering plant in Long Prairie. The available news is unclear whether he was fined for the incident.
The West Fargo Fire Department, State Troopers, and Highway Department workers all cleaned up the mess and sanitized the roadway. I can’t imagine how awful that must have been, or what they did with the debris. I just hope it wasn’t too hot out.
What is the biggest mess you have ever had to clean up?
Trail Baboon 
Morning all. The two biggest messes that come to mind are ones I’ve written about here on the Trail. The first one was when the shelf fell down in my studio and every single thing on that shelf (and pretty much everything underneath it) ended up on the floor, including a large box of beads that came open as it fell. Truly a mess. The other one was the mess from hell that tim and I made when we sandblasted my front porch. tim looked like an alien from another planet when we knocked off and cleaned up using the hose in the backyard!
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When I was growing up in Eastern Iowa, we went to Dubuque one Sunday. We came home to our refinished basement with about a foot of water in it.
Apparently, when the house was built (maybe 20 years prior), they had dumped a bunch of heavy construction waste on top of the water main in the front yard, and it had finally broken. One of the few times I ever saw my mother cry.
Thank goodness it was summer, so we could dry some things out on the yard, but I know a lot got dumped.
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Rise and Get Out the Mop, Baboons,
My first thought after reading the question was “Can you imagine coping with the Oval Office after there is a change?” The pictures of that golden mess are appalling. I hope our leadership can envision cleaning up the nationwide mess occurring now.
I have cleaned up many messes. One of the smelliest was during and following a norovirus. My mother, my (then) 21-month old toddler and I travelled to Western South Dakota to visit my sister and family. My sister had the lead in a community theater production of Bye,Bye Birdie. We attended just at the moment a Norovirus made the rounds. Toddler Son caught it first and threw up all over the interior of my mother’s new car. The virus proceeded into diarrhea, then I caught it too. We spent about a day in the intense part of all that. It required no end of cleaning. At the worst point we inhabited the bathroom. I put him, diaper-less and with diarrhea, in the bathtub with him clinging to my knees while I sat on the potty holding a wastebasket in which I vomited. By the end of the bug, I was begging for mercy.
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Yikes! From the comments so far, I think I am very lucky to not be able to come up with anything that bad. I’ve cleaned up from bouts of diarrhea and vomiting, had to change sheets and get a new mattress pad, etc.
More comments may trigger more memories…
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Ah, I remember one – early 80s, we had been painting in the 1885 Winona house, left the paint can (with lid on, but still…) at top of steep, rustic basement stairway. Toodler Joel decided to open that door and explore, tipped the can, which effectively painted the basement stairs…
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when the pandemic was the final straw and i was forced to move out of my ware house i had 10000 sq ft of stored organized stuff to be dealt with. the landlord got frustrated with how slowly i was transitioning and called in the junk removal team but the estimate came in around $50,000 and i continued foe 3 months moving it into 10 mini storage units and 3 semi trailers after having an ibid sale that moved a bunch of it at next to nothing prices. my next door neighbor at the warehouse bid $1 on hundreds of items that he dimply move out to the loading dock into his space .
i finally in a position to get going on liquidation of this collection.
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oh i also filled 8 dumpsters 40 ft long
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Yikes!
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Now I’m glad I’m only responsible for what’s in this little house!
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I’ve probably told this story before. Cleaning out Kelly’s parents house. Up in an attic in July and it was 110 degree’s up there was tough.
But the worst was the basement freezers. They had three. One had defrosted at some point and the bottom foot was solid ice. I had found bags before of frozen cranberries and bags of frozen chicken. Once we got it all defrosted I was digging in 12″ of blood red water fishing out meat. Our son looked over my shoulder, he was maybe 14 at the time, Put his hand on my shoulder and said ‘You’re a better man than me’. Truly, it was only because I KNEW it was cranberries and chicken that I could do that…
Course depression era people, they had saved a lot of stuff… baskets full of corn cobs in case the power went out and they had to burn them for heat. And then you get old and can’t get to the basement anymore…
Life is rough. Then you………. , you know. Move on.
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If you brake hard, anything in the back of the truck will slide forward. This driver must have accelerated very rapidly to get the carcasses to slide backward.
I think the worst mess for me was two litterboxes that I had underneath the laundry tub when the laundry tub overflowed. I had the sort of litter that is supposed to clump. It turned into a very sludgy mess.
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Also, if the truck was suddenly lighter by the combined weight of 15 buffalo, one wonders how the driver couldn’t have noticed unless those 15 were a small portion of the total number of carcasses the truck was carrying.
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My thoughts exactly!
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In 1973, wasband and I were living in a rented house on Nawadaha Blvd. in Minneapolis. It was a cheaply constructed and poorly insulated small house built on a cement slab with just a crawl space under the main floor.
A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving we began having trouble with the toilet not flushing properly. We tried the usual fixes with plungers and whatnot to no avail, so we called our landlord for help. He promptly dispatched a guy with a retractable snake who in short order had the problem solved. Unfortunately the fix didn’t last, and within a few days the whole house, especially the kitchen began to stink.
It turned out that the snake had punctured the pipe that transported the waste from the toilet to the sewer, and the crawlspace underneath the kitchen floor was filling up with raw sewage. Possibly because of the proximity to Thanksgiving, though I’m pretty sure the nature of the problem certainly also played in, no plumber was available to deal with the issue till after the holiday.
The crawlspace was accessible through a trap door in the broom closet in the kitchen. I spent many, many hours on my stomach scooping out the sh*t from the crawlspace and wasband carrying buckets full of waste to a container by the back door that the landlord had helpfully provided.
To add insult to injury, to show his appreciation for what wonderful renters we were, landlord sent us a gift basket of artificial orange colored flowers.
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I think you win the most awful mess award!
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In older houses it’s common for the transition from the toilet to the sewer stack to have been formed out of sheet lead rather than an actual pipe. I would guess that that’s what the plumber punched through with his snake.
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I used to need a rendering truck every so often. Middle of summer I didn’t know how they could stand it.
They use a cable to pull the carcass into the truck. Just wrap it around neck or legs or whatever is available. That part I could handle, but crawling in the truck, over the pile of previous pick ups, to retrieve the cable for the next one… ew.
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