Chaos As Frozen Potatoes Cause Highway To Close For Hours

A portion of Interstate 94 in Minnesota was closed on Thursday morning due to the unlikeliest of obstacles, frozen potatoes.

According to the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT), a vehicular crash on the eastbound stretch of road in Albertville resulted in a load of potatoes being dumped onto the highway, where low temperatures meant they quickly started freezing to the road.

While you wouldn't think that potatoes could cause so much trouble, MnDOT needed specialist equipment to unstick them from the highway without posing a risk to other drivers.

Nobody was seriously injured in the crash, though a few potatoes might have been a little mashed or chipped, CBC Minnesota reports.

According to KNSI Radio, the potato spillage has since been cleaned up and all lanes of Interstate 94 have been reopened now that they are free of debris and dinner.

The spillage occurred around 4.45am local time, when two trucks collided with each other and one of them rolled over. Other vehicles on the highway that hit the spilled potatoes and debris on the road were also disabled, making it obvious that the authorities would need to close the road for a while before traffic could resume.

It took several hours to clear all of the potatoes from the highway, and the clean-up crew possibly wondered how often they'd be able to put their newly acquired skills of peeling potatoes off the road surface to good use.

If nothing else this story has demonstrated that the correct temperature to fuse a load of potatoes to a highway is somewhere around -13°C, so all that's needed now is to invent a recipe involving freezing potatoes on the road...

We can only hope that future deliveries of potatoes in Minnesota aren't delayed in such a way again because having to explain this situation once is hard enough, if it happens again absolutely nobody is going to believe us.

There's no word on whether enterprising locals would be able to grab a few spuds that have been left lying around, although we don't recommend combing the highway for runaway vegetables.

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