April 8, 2007: Red road in Massachusetts

[Undertoad]

Kind of a fun one. There was a bit of an accident with red dye in Littleton, MA last week.

You know how some mulch is a kind of red color that doesn't match nature, exactly? That mulch doesn't start red; it is dyed. They color it so that it can match your landscaping, or offset it, I guess. Because some people feel that the outdoor is not pretty enough without sharply delineated lines of colors that nature doesn't normally spit out.

Turns out a truck lost four barrels of the dye used to color that mulch, and three of the barrels burst open. Which wouldn't be so bad except that the barrels were 400 gallons each: thus putting 1200 gallons of red mulch dye onto I-495.

It happened at 10 at night, but the whole thing was still a mess in the morning.



Some cars found they were picking up the color and had to be washed using a through soaking, but luckily it isn't permanent.



Of course some photographers couldn't resist running out and turning up their color saturation.