Yahoo News Truck full of toilet roll goes up in flames after crashing
Toilet paper was left strewn across a highway in Texas after a truck carrying a huge load of rolls crashed and caught fire.
The driver of the 18-wheeler tractor-trailer lost control of the truck on the Interstate 20 near Dallas, Texas, at 4.15am on Wednesday morning.
The crash caused the vehicle and its load to catch fire, and police closed all westbound lanes of the interstate for several hours.
The industry-sized toilet rolls "burned extensively" in the blaze, the Texas Department of Transportation told Dallas TV station WFAA.
Crash spills toilet paper across I-20 in South Dallas. A semi heading to San Antonio from Alabama rolls over catching fire. Avoid I-20 westbound at I-45 if possible. It will take crews a few hours to clean up the paper mess. No one was hurt in the crash. pic.twitter.com/1jtr1BNRwO
— Nune (@kdfw015)
The driver was not seriously injured in the crash, authorities said.
Toilet paper has been in high demand across the world since the start of the coronavirus outbreak.
The demand for toilet paper sparked the trending hashtags #toiletpapergate and #toiletpapercrisis on Twitter, along with photographs of shopping trolleys piled high with rolls, and calls for calm from baffled officials.
Loo rolls were even chained to the walls inside public toilets in Hackney to stop park users stealing them.
With shoppers stripping the supermarket shelves last month, a store manager at a Tesco Extra superstore in north London told customers: “If you want loo roll, come and queue at 4.30am for our opening at 5am.”
Revealing the extent of panic-buying, shoppers made an extra 42 million visits to supermarkets in just four days in March.
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