If your long lost lover lives near Orange County, California you might be waiting a little bit longer to finally hear from him/her. A U.S. Postal Truck carrying 120,000 pieces of mail went up in flames yesterday after two big rigs collided on the freeway.

Hope you kept a carbon copy of that heartfelt missive because all the snail mail was lost in the fiery inferno, reports the Orange County Register. The truck carrying the mail reportedly rear-ended another semi-truck in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, starting a fire that enveloped the truck and lasted for about an hour. The driver wasn’t injured.

Birthday cards and car payments coming from the USPS processing center in Santa Ana were headed around the country, a spokesman said. Anyone non-local letters mailed from surrounding ZIP codes — starting with 926, 927, 928, 906, 917 and 918 — could be affected.

The USPS can’t pin down exactly which letters are burned to ash right now, but anyone worried about late fees or other penalties can get documentation of the fire from the agency.

“Customers who mailed important items may want to follow up with recipients in the next few days to determine if their letter arrived,” the spokesman added.

That’s what I’ll tell my nieces and nephews when I’m inevitably late sending their birthday cards this year. A fire ate them. And the hundreds of dollars in cash I stuck in the envelopes, too. Yeah, that’s it!

You can follow MBQ on Twitter if her tendency to forget your birthday won’t bother you: @marybethquirk

Fire after 57 big-rig crash burns 120,000 O.C. letters [Orange County Register]

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