By now, most retailers have become sensitive to media reports of labor abuses in their supply chains — but a new report from USA Today suggests that abuses occurring during the last leg of a product’s journey — from the port to the store — may have escaped attention. [More]
tractor-trailers
Televised Car Chase Followed Rogue Tractor-Trailer Full Of Cabbage And Lettuce
By 1.14.16
Last week, police chased a rogue tractor-trailer in Texas after the vehicle’s owner reported that the driver was out of contact. The chase was televised, but at first it wasn’t clear why the driver of a truck full of vegetables was fleeing from the police in the first place. Today, sources explained the real reason for that car chase: law enforcement suspects that the driver planned to sell the trailer’s contents himself. [More]
Weirdly Symmetrical Tractor-Trailer Crashes Scatter Live Piglets, Cases Of Bacon Across Highways
By 6.9.15
Here at Consumerist, we have a completely understandable obsession with tractor-trailer accidents where food ends up strewn across the highway, especially when no one is seriously injured. Yet there’s a strange symmetry to two unrelated accidents in the last week that left thousands of live piglets running from the wreck in Ohio, and 70,000 pounds of bacon strewn across train tracks and a highway in Illinois. [More]
Truck Carrying 30,000 Pounds Of Lobsters Overturns, All Survive To Become Dinner
By 3.19.15
When a tractor-trailer tips over and spills its edible cargo on the highway, it’s simultaneously sad and hilarious as long as no one is seriously injured. In that case, it would be just sad. Heavy snow in Maine yesterday caused a tractor-trailer accident involving one truck and thousands of lobsters. [More]
Tractor-Trailer Crashes, Spills Tons Of Twizzlers Across Highway
By 3.12.15
Overnight, south of Pittsburgh, a highway was transformed into the least fun candy land ever. Police say that fog may have caused the driver of a tractor-trailer to hit a barrier, splitting its trailer down the middle and spilling its contents on the highway. No, no, truck driver, it’s much too early for Easter. [More]
West Coast Ports Contract Dispute Hurts Self-Employed Truckers
By 2.18.15
While shipping companies and dockworkers continue their dispute over contracts on the Pacific coast, the slowdown of cargo from these ports is starting to affect factories, retailers, and farmers. (Not to mention the French fry situation in Japan.) Yet one unaffiliated group that’s losing out are the truck drivers who would normally bring much of the cargo now waiting just off the shore to its final destination. [More]
FedEx Truck Rollover Spills Packages On New Jersey Highway
By 12.16.14
Yesterday was the busiest shipping day of the entire year for the U.S. Postal Service and for FedEx, which could have made a tractor-trailer accident that happened early on Monday morning in New Jersey even more disastrous. While the driver sustained only minor injuries, the accident spilled packages across the highway and affected traffic for the rest of the morning. [More]
Potato Truck Overturns On Oregon Highway, Creates Massive Hash Brown
By 10.7.14
The driver of the tractor-trailer that crashed this morning on a highway in Oregon says that he swerved to miss a deer. He lost control of the truck, which rolled over, spilling its cargo on the shoulder. Its cargo of delicious red potatoes. [More]
Tractor-Trailer Overturns, Spills 40,000 Pounds Of Chicken
By 1.15.14
This was not the kind of icy, light-colored material that one expects to find strewn across the road in January. A tractor-trailer hauling frozen chicken from Texas to South Carolina overturned yesterday morning on a highway onramp near Atlanta. When the vehicle overturned, the chicken spilled out across the onramp. [More]
