A tale of two trucks

I was reminded by the stand-still traffic story in lynxkitten and dcsmrgun's journals of a weird incident Doug and I had while driving our Ryder truck down from New York.

While driving through Virginia, we ran into stand-still traffic on a three-lane highway. As we crawled along, we eventually discovered that it was because all of the traffic was being funneled into the leftmost lane. The other two lanes were closed off with cones and signs. So we crawl along for some undetermined distance until we started to see some of the cause of all the fuss—there were EMS trucks, police cars, fire trucks, and guys in hazmat suits scattered around in both of the closed lanes. We tuned to the news, thinking we must've run into something really serious, but we didn't hear anything.. and then we found out what it was all about. There was a big, white semi truck parked at the head of all of the emergency vehicles. Inside of it were what looked like gasoline barrels. And the top of the trailer was completely caved in. Not like it had been crushed... but in a perfect V-shape, as though something had fallen smartly right in the middle of it and sort of folded it in. It was one of the weirdest things I've ever seen, and I never found out what happened.

By the way, if Urinetown: The Musical passes through your town on tour, definitely see it. It's a hoot.