30/52 - Milk Truck Accident

We live in beautiful country surrounded by farming, with open irrigation ditches snaking through the valley along many of the roads. There are several organic dairies, so it is a common sight see Milky Way dairy tankers picking up the product multiple times per day. But sometimes things don't go according to plan, like when milk trucks and irrigation ditches meet.

This past Saturday, we got a call from our neighbor saying that there was a "milk truck accident", and that there may be milk leaking into the irrigation ditch. As I went out to turn off our pump in an effort to keep any milk from entering our sprinklers, I could already tell that it was too late; the yard smelled like milk. When I reached our settling pond, I saw the first visual confirmation.

This isn't supposed to be white.

I hopped on my bike to see if I could find the source of the spill. About a half mile up the road, the flashing lights lead me to the scene of the accident. It would have been hard to miss.

Somewhere around 1:30pm that afternoon, the wheel of a milk truck filled with somewhere around 7,000 gallons of milk slipped off the edge of the roadway. I imagine that the sloshing of the milk - around 25 tons - made it impossible to recover, and the entire rig rolled over, putting both tankers into the ditch. Before I arrived, the driver had already been taken away by Life Flight with a broken scapula and a punctured lung. I hear that he is expected to recover. But man, the driver compartment in that tractor looks scary.

The state police, county sheriff, county road department, and Milky Way reps were already on scene; the first wave of the emergency cleanup team arrived about an hour later.

The first tanker continued to leak its approximately 5,000 gallons of milk into the ditch for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. In high enough concentrations, milk can actually be toxic to fish, so we closed the headgate of the ditch and tried to pump as much of what remained out onto the fields rather than have it flow back into the White Salmon River at the end of the ditch.

The second tanker did not rupture in the accident, but both tanks had to be pumped of any remaining liquids so that they could be lifted out of the ditch. The cleanup crew worked through the night and had all of the vehicles and most of the detritus from the accident gone by morning.

A number of the ditch board members helped to coordinate getting the ditch cleaned up and ready to irrigate by the next day. It wasn't exactly how I planned to spend my weekend, but I guess that's a small price to pay for getting to live where we do.

- Mike, Corinne, Anders, and ??