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.
He said on Wednesday afternoon that he had assumed that most of the coins had been collected, and that the remaining change had been washed away by the four inches of rain earlier in the day, which caused minor flooding in the town of about 1,400 residents.
Mr. Caviness said that he had just held a meeting about the highway curve where the accident had happened at which officials discussed whether to increase police presence there because of speeding drivers.
The 18-wheeler was traveling southbound when the driver veered off the roadway, overcorrected and caused the truck to roll onto its side, Sergeant De La Cerda said.
The company that owns the truck, Western Distributing Transportation Corp., said on its website that it transports cargo that requires safeguarding for many government divisions, including its banks. It said that its tractors are fully armored and have an armed driver and guard.
A worker who answered the phone at the company’s headquarters in Denver on Wednesday would not comment.
Route 287 goes to the Dallas area, which has a branch of the Federal Reserve Bank. The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
The buzz in town on Tuesday was that $8 million in dimes had been spilled rather than the $800,000 that was actually in the truck, said Randy Major, who works at Allsup’s Convenience Store, which is next to the highway curve where the spill took place. He said that they could see only flashing lights for much of the day; a hill obscured the view.
Mr. Caviness said, “We were joking around that city of Alvord would be metal detecting.”
But no crowd ever showed up.
