Shrimp spill from semi on side of highway near Sedan

Thursday was a bad day to be a seafood lover in Chautauqua County.

Around 5 p.m. Thursday, a semi carrying about 10,000 pounds of shrimp rolled over on the K-99 highway about 20 miles north of the Oklahoma border, according to the Kansas Highway Patrol.

Trooper Kelly McIntosh said the truck was driving south on the highway when one of its front wheels went off the road. The driver overcorrected and the truck tipped over and skidded across the highway, coming to rest in the east ditch, McIntosh said.

The driver was not injured.

The top of the trailer was ruptured, and about half of the roughly 600 cases of shrimp on board “busted out of there and kind of spewed into the ditch,” McIntosh said.

The Kansas Department of Agriculture responded to the scene and deemed it a total loss, McIntosh said.

The shrimp were seized and will likely be taken to a landfill on Friday, he said.

The section of highway where the semi tipped over is a hot spot for semi accidents, said Barry Speer, a deputy with the Chautauqua County Sheriff’s Office.

“We’ve probably had 10 semi accidents in this same location,” he said. “This year we lost a load of soybeans … then we lost a load of salt there. I’ve seen a truck full of milk crash there. It’s a box trailer, all packed and ready for Wal-Mart – you walk down there and just see gallons of milk coming out. There’s something there.”

McIntosh said he is “flabbergasted” by the number of accidents that happen on that stretch of highway.

“It’s a straightaway with a little bit of grade there for southbound traffic – enough grade there that they’ve got a no-passing zone in there,” McIntosh said. “Other than that, it’s straight and there’s definitely no reason whatsoever, you know, why they would go off. It’s all driver error, and how do you fix that?”

K-99 was closed for about five hours Thursday night while crews cleaned up after the shrimp spill.

This story was originally published October 23, 2015 at 3:44 PM with the headline "Shrimp spill from semi on side of highway near Sedan."