(Lego)Man Overboard! & Other Unscheduled Deliveries
It’s not every day that an 8 foot tall Lego man washes ashore, yet it has happened twice; a green-shirted man landed on the shores of Brighton Beach on October 30th, and a year earlier, a similar blue-shirted man arrived at the Zandvoort, a resort in the Netherlands. These towering plastic men most likely went overboard on their overseas transport, which led me to wonder, what else falls off cargo ships?
Apparently, lots of things. The Netherlands seems to be no stranger to the strange castaway; in November of last year, thousands of Cuban bananas from a cargo ship appeared on the beaches of the Dutch North Sea island, Terschelling. Before the bananas, Terschelling has seen tennis shoes, children’s toys, aluminum briefcases and even sweaters littered by the sea, leading many residents to see the beach as the perfect spot for treasure hunting.
Stateside sands see a lot less bizarre debris, but that doesn’t mean we are without. A couple years ago, a broken cargo container full of Doritos appeared in North Carolina, giving locals enough junk food to last them years.
A nd let’s not forget about the shipment mishaps of the road either. One website, Truck Spills, has created a space devoted entirely to the odd things that come spilling out of trucks. The site provides pictures and stories of all kinds of cargo accidents that will boggle the mind.
Take, for example, the liquid red dye that spilled from a truck in Massachusetts, leaving the interstate looking like something out of the Wizard of Oz. Or, perhaps one of the more tragic ones, the cases of Grolsch that fell from a truck in Canada, littering the road with broken bottles and beer. Such a waste of beer!
Cases of Keystone Light also graced the asphalt of I-70 in Colorado, but because they were in cans, they remained mostly unharmed. Free beer! The list goes on and on, including anything from molasses to Jell-O.
So be it the highway or the ocean way, the cargo doesn’t always stay where it’s supposed to. But hey, Ship Happens!
