A Caltrans Headache : Spills and Thrills on the Freeway

Traffic reporter Bill Keene recalls the time a truck spilled cabbage on the Pomona Freeway and the next day a truck loaded with salad oil sprang a leak in the same place.

“Why was the guy so late with the dressing?” Keene wonders.

He can remember boxes of brassieres falling on the Santa Ana Freeway, fish that dropped on the Harbor (“when the (California) Highway Patrol arrived, you had fish and ‘Chips’ ”) and the armored truck that spilled money out its back door on the Hollywood.

“You’d think the driver would remember to close his back door, but then I guess I don’t always button my wallet pocket, either,” Keene says.

A lot of water, milk, molasses, beer, catsup and countless other substances have flowed under the overpass since Keene began monitoring the freeways for radio station KNX 10 years ago. He has reported on everything from hay, dog food, coal, illegal drugs (usually lost at night) and fruit juice (one 8,000-pound splash recently) to a load of crushed cars on the Pomona Freeway.

Incidence Increasing

But Keene can’t ever remember as many spills in Southern California as have occurred in the last few months.

“Ever since the break for the Olympics, it’s like everyone had been saving all their junk to lose on the freeway,” Keene says. “People are losing the damnedest things. Just the other day there was an outhouse sitting on the Hollywood Freeway--right in the middle!”

Caltrans officials agree that the number of spills is likely to exceed last year’s statewide total, which was 2,612, according to its figures. “In Los Angeles and the Bay Area, the problem’s been especially acute during the last month,” says spokesman Gene Berthelson.

No one knows for sure why the problem is getting worse, however, because no one can remember a study of freeway spills ever being conducted.

Linked to Economy

Berthelson ascribes the rise simply to increased automobile and truck traffic. “It’s at the saturation point in areas like Los Angeles, and a truck driver who has to stop quickly is less likely to avoid an accident,” he says.

Kent Milton, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol, cites a federal study that found that more traffic accidents in general occur when the economy is on the upswing, as it seems to be now. And a truck spill is the most visible kind of accident, such as the 23,000-pound load of pianos that crashed in a crescendo on the Long Beach Freeway the other day.

Theories aside, Caltrans officials know who the motorist caught in, say, an avocado avalanche on the Artesia Freeway is likely to blame.

“Us,” groans Junious Fontenot, superintendent of Caltrans’ metro region. “Especially when some announcer on the radio makes a joke like, ‘Well, Caltrans has made another mess on the freeway.’ ”

The irony is not lost on Caltrans, whose Major Incident Response Team (MIRT) scoops up nearly all of the spills.

“Here my guys are out there busting their butts so that traffic can move again,” says Jerry Holcombe, a Caltrans maintenance supervisor, “and people driving by are throwing beer cans and orange peels at us and shouting things relating to our parenthood.”

Most companies prefer not to clean up after themselves and, instead, are billed by Caltrans. When a small forest of Christmas trees tumbled out of someone’s sled on the Pomona Freeway in December in a fairly typical catastrophe, the bill for the three-hour cleanup came to $2,500.

Caltrans believes that it has improved its operation in the last few years by upgrading its beleaguered response team. The team’s traffic unit, for example, now sets out more portable electronic signs alerting motorists one mile or more before approaching a spill. Information on freeway incidents also is sent out immediately to local radio stations and other media outlets, automobile clubs and bus companies.

Chemical Spills

The response team’s maintenance unit also has refined its handling of chemical spills.

“If we’re not equipped to clean it up or if we can’t identify it, we have consulting firms under contract that we can call in at a moment’s notice,” says Ray Higa, a senior maintenance engineer.

Caltrans’ chief of community relations, W. T. (Doc) Maloney, adds: “Our procedures are a lot more stringent than they used to be. I remember once, years ago, when some workers in the Valley found an object and just tossed it off the road. It blew up--it was an explosive device.

“Another time a crew picked up some low-yield radioactive materials off a freeway and literally put them on the supervisor’s desk. Asked him what they should do with them. If they found something like that today, they’d cordon off the area.”

Special Care

Special care is also taken when the items falling out of the truck are alive.

“Up on the 210 a couple of years ago some big Brahman bulls spilled out,” Maloney recalled. “We had to go and get some cowboys to lasso them. A couple of them attacked cars. It’s quite a sight to see a bull going against a Toyota.”

Keene adds: “I’ve heard of cows attacking black and whites (police cars) up around Newhall. I guess if it was a Holstein it thought the car was a female.”

Then there were the chickens that fell (or jumped) off a truck near the Vineland off-ramp of the Ventura Freeway in the early 1970s. Most were recaptured, but some evaded trackers and they--or their descendants--are still glimpsed by drivers.

Another type of two-legged creature also makes life difficult for the response team.

“People will stop for almost anything that spills,” Higa says. “I’ve seen people picking up cantaloupes on the Santa Ana Freeway for a quarter-mile. Loaves of bread, apples, raw fish.”

When an armored truck spilled a load of coins a couple of years ago, Caltrans had to close all four lanes of the Hollywood Freeway in one direction.

“A lot of motorists were out there picking up next month’s rent,” Higa says.

Response team troopers arrived and found they couldn’t sweep up the loot because much of it lay in the grooves in the freeway.

“My men had to get down on their hands and knees and scoop up the coins,” Holcombe recalls. “We got about 90% of it.”

And did anyone pat the response team on the back?

“Not only didn’t the company thank us,” Holcombe says, “but a neighborhood paper ran a cartoon a week later that showed a man in a Caltrans uniform in a bank with coins spilling out of his pocket.”

Fontenot says he receives about 25 written complaints a month from the public, most singling out Caltrans for blocking traffic. “What people don’t understand is that often when there’s an overturned truck, the cleanup of the mess is only the first step,” he says. “Later, we may have to come back to repair damaged guard rails or fences or whatever. I guess the people don’t see any spill and can’t figure out what we’re doing.”

And thank you notes?

Fontenot searched through his file of correspondence dating back a year. Nary a one.

Response team members are on call 24 hours a day.

Take Job Home

“It’s always at 3 in the morning when the frozen chickens fall out of a truck,” says Maloney, who used to work that detail.

And sunny afternoons?

“That’s when there’s a syrup spill.”

Or peanut butter.

Often, workers can’t help but take their job home. “There are days when I walk in the door and my wife’ll say, ‘Uh oh, we had another Bandini spill, eh?’ ” Holcombe says.

While Californians may not overwhelm Caltrans with gratitude, they are not reluctant to ask favors of the agency, such as the retrieval of small items they have spilled on the freeway.

“I just heard from a woman who lost the top off her cooler on a median of the Harbor Freeway,” Holcombe says. “If I can reach it, I will.

“Once I retrieved a hubcap for a Pasadena woman. It couldn’t have been worth more than $5. She actually wrote me back and thanked me. That made me feel good.”

Often the request comes in too late. “If someone calls and says they’ve lost a suitcase on the freeway, we tell them if it happened more than a couple of hours ago, it’s gone, someone has picked it up,” Fontenot says.

Caltrans will hold unclaimed, identifiable items for up to 30 days. Everything else goes to the trash-compactor.

The small, quirky spills--the ones not likely to be noticed by the average motorist whizzing by--are the ones that intrigue Maloney.

“Sooner or later you see everything when you work out there,” he says. “You’ll be walking down the freeway and find one shoe, the second shoe, one sock, the second sock, down to . . . well, the last piece of clothing. I mean the very last. You wonder how did they get out of their car and where did they go?”