Truck Overturns, and Millions of Dimes Spill Onto Texas Highway

The scene looked as if a giant piggy bank had been split open, its loose change scattering and forming a metallic sea.

In fact, it was the aftermath of an accident in which an 18-wheeler had rolled onto its side a little over an hour before sunrise on Tuesday on U.S. Route 287 in Alvord, Texas, a town about 50 miles north of Fort Worth.

What had spilled out was part of a load of eight million dimes, Sgt. Josue De La Cerda of the Texas Department of Public Safety said on Wednesday.

The truck was carrying the freshly minted coins for the U.S. Mint, according to the Wise County E.M.S. Rescue, which responded to the rollover at 5:15 a.m. The driver and the passenger suffered injuries that were not life-threatening and were later released from a hospital, officials said. There were no other injuries.

It took about 14 hours before the southbound lanes of the highway reopened.

In that time, cleanup crews used heavy-duty vacuum trucks to suck up the loose coins that had spilled onto the two lanes of highway. Other workers used shovels and their bare hands to scoop up piles of dirt to collect the dimes that scattered off the roadway.

“The funniest part to me was that they picked up the dimes using the vacuum trucks that are used to suck out sewage and water and stuff like that,” said Mayor Caleb Caviness of Alvord.