Truck drops 'basketball-sized chunks' of rising dough all over a Washington highway

Read Story Transcript

Brooke Bova says "a comedy of errors" led to a freeway being covered in rising globs of dough earlier this week.

It was about 30 C in Washington when a truck transporting leftover bread dough from a bakery got stuck in traffic on Interstate 5 en route to Tacoma. 

"I think the combination of the yeast and the heat and the length of time that he was on the freeway, it just reached a boiling point, I guess, and made the dough rise," Bova, the information officer for Washington State Patrol, told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.

"When I got there, there was just massive amounts of dough that was falling from plastic bags and swelling the plastic bags to a bursting point and just dropping in big, basketball-sized chunks all over the freeway."

So Bova did what most modern people would do in that situation — she got out her phone and started taking pictures and video for social media.

"When you're working state patrol and in law enforcement, a lot of what we tweet out and put on social media is to advise drivers of traffic conditions and serious injury collisions or often fatalities, so instead of doing the normal tragedy and doom and gloom, it was just nice to have something fun and different," she said. 

"And honestly, it was something in my career I never would have thought I would ever respond to, and I probably never will again, so I just had to capture the moment."

The dough, she said, was on its way to a factory in Tacoma to be turned into livestock feed. The driver told Bova he transports the stuff all the time, and nothing like this has ever happened before. 

"He was very embarrassed," she said. "He was a really good sport about it, letting me take pictures and video as long as I didn't put his name or his image on it."

The factory owners showed up to the scene and helped the state patrollers clean up the mess — some of which was literally turning into bread on the hot pavement.

All in all, Bova said, taffic was unaffected and nobody was hurt.

"There was really no damage," she said. "It wasn't a hazard. I mean, it's dough."