It's bad enough when an overturned truck spills milk or beer onto a freeway. It's worse when it spills glue.
One thousand gallons of carpet glue 3-inches thick covered the northbound lanes of I-15 near Mesquite, Nev., all day on June 2, reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
A tractor-trailer driver fell asleep at the wheel at 2:15 a.m., went off the road and flipped his rig on an embankment, said Angie Wolff of the Nevada Highway Patrol (search).
"He's fine," she said. "He's really feeling bad about falling asleep. He's lucky he's alive."
A few other big rigs managed to navigate around the mess, but authorities quickly closed the northbound lanes after it became clear the glue fumes posed a safety hazard.
Twenty members of a state hazardous-materials team spent hours shoveling glue in order to free the truck and its trailer, which were firmly stuck to the roadway.
Wearing hazmat suits in the hot desert sun, they spent several more hours dumping glue into five-gallon buckets to make sure the freeway could reopen the following morning.
Wolff said the driver would be cited for the accident, and his company would be billed for the cost of the cleanup.
Mesquite is about 60 miles northeast of Las Vegas on the Arizona state line.
— Thanks to Out There reader Cynthia F.
ER Wait Makes Woman Call 911
WEYMOUTH, Mass. (AP) — A Braintree woman suffering from an asthma attack called an ambulance to the emergency room at South Shore Hospital (search) after she was told she'd have to wait at least two hours to see a doctor.
Christine Howard, 39, was taken to Quincy Medical Center (search), where she spent the next two days recovering.
Howard told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy that she'd waited in the ER at South Shore in Weymouth for an hour on April 27 before nurses told her she'd have to wait even longer.
They refused her request to call an ambulance because she wouldn't sign a release form, so Howard dialed 911 on her cell phone.
Dr. John Benanti, chief of the emergency department at South Shore Hospital, said Howard was "not at any medical risk" and received the appropriate care from nurses.
He declined to comment on Howard's admission to Quincy Medical Center, saying he had no information about it. A Quincy Medical Center spokeswoman confirmed that Howard was admitted, but declined to give further details.
Howard said she's had asthma since she was 13 and knows when it's getting serious. She said two inhaler treatments administered at South Shore didn't work.
"At this point my face was gray," Howard said. "I said to the nurse, 'You need to call a doctor for me.' She said, 'You and everyone else. You have to wait another two hours.'"
Peter Dreyer, head of the state Division of Health Care Quality, said he was not aware of the incident, but it would be "pretty unusual" for a patient in the emergency room to call for an ambulance.
"If all the facts are as [Howard] asserts, this is something we would want to look at," he said.
— Thanks to Out There reader David J.
Those Prison Buses Are Such a Pain
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — If you can't do the time, don't do the whine with federal Judge Thomas A. Higgins.
David Bowman, 41, appeared before the judge in U.S. District Court Wednesday on charges he violated probation by smoking crack, running up $6,000 on his mother's credit card and then threatening to torch her house after she turned him in.
But Bowman's big concern was that uncomfortable return ride to prison. He told the court he didn't think he could handle the crowded prison bus and the endless jailhouse transfer points.
In a situation where other defendants might humbly ask a judge for mercy, Bowman asked Higgins to personally drive him back to prison.
The judge instead ordered Bowman to return — by bus — to prison to finish serving 37 months of his supervised release sentence for cocaine distribution. Higgins tacked on another four months, the maximum he could order served consecutively.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Sunny A.M. Koshy suggested the extra time behind bars would give Bowman extra time to think.
"I think part of the problem is that Mr. Bowman doesn't do as much thinking as maybe you or I would like him to," Higgins said.
Parents Get Prom-Sex Letter Mailed From School
SELDEN, N.Y. (AP) — Parents opened their mailboxes to find an official-looking letter offering birth control — and motel rooms — for the upcoming senior prom.
They were not amused — and neither, needless to say, were the stunned administrators of the Long Island high school.
"It's inexcusable, offensive and quite frankly demeaning of all individuals," Mitchell Ross, principal of the Newfield High School in Selden, said Friday in a telephone interview.
The letter, an apparent end-of-the-year prank, described a "Protection Package" of "very specific birth control items," including condoms, Ross said.
It also stated that "a number of rooms will be made available" for interested students at the Inn at East Wind in Wading River, where the prom is to be held June 23.
The hotel, which was notified of the prank, does not rent out rooms to high school students, said Ross.
The letter's official-looking letterhead actually was a "cut and paste job," Ross said.
He said the school, which has about 400 seniors, has narrowed the list of likely culprits to 10 but believed only one or two students were involved.
Ross said the mailing list used in the prank, first reported by Newsday in its Friday editions, apparently had been stolen from one of two student offices. The list had been missing since April, but officials at the time did not know if it was stolen or simply misplaced.
Ross said the prank letter envelopes were mixed in with other legitimate school bulk mailings.
Like Me to Wipe Your Rotors, Sir?
OSLO, Norway (AP) — Erling Boland didn't know what to think when a swarm of six helicopters noisily swooped down on his gas station.
"It was surrealistic. I thought this must be the latest sequence for a James Bond film," Boland told The Associated Press by telephone on Friday. "Or maybe it was Al Qaeda up to something."
It turned out one of the two-man helicopters, all being flown by German tourists, was running low on fuel so they all decided to land and tank up.
Boland, 58, was inside the gas station-convenience store he has owned for the past 25 years when he heard the first helicopter overhead on Thursday.
"I went out to look because I thought maybe it was an ambulance helicopter and that there had been an accident," he said of the incident in remote Hatlestrand, some 175 miles west of Oslo.
"I saw a helicopter, but knew it was too small to be an ambulance helicopter. I also thought it was making an awful lot of noise for one small helicopter," he said.
Then he saw the other five coming for a landing. When they had landed, he talked to the pilots and learned they were German helicopter enthusiasts touring Norway by air, two to a chopper.
The Germans efficiently folded up the rotors on their helicopters, put small wheels on the skids and rolled them up to the gas pumps to the amusement of a quickly growing crowd.
They bought about 65 gallons of 95-octane fuel and a bottle of lead fuel additive, which wasn't exactly a huge sale for Boland.
"But I will be telling this story at dinner parties for the rest of my life," said Boland.
Entire Country Takes Advantage of Computer Glitch
REYKJAVIK, Iceland — A computer glitch resulted in $61 round-trip tickets to Iceland for more than 100 people who happened to notice the bargain on the www.cheaptickets.com Web site, according to the Iceland Tourist Board.
The fare, inadvertently posted May 25 for a day and a half, is less than 10 percent of the cost of a typical spring/summer Icelandair ticket, which runs about $787.
Those lucky enough to grab the deal are getting another gift from the Iceland Tourist Board (search): free admission to the country's geothermal pools. Visitors need only show their $61 tickets to get in.
"Even though we had no prior knowledge of this low-cost deal, we wanted to say thank you to the individuals who looked into traveling to Iceland and were rewarded for their efforts," said Einar Gustavsson, director of the Iceland Tourist Board.
Compiled by Foxnews.com's Paul Wagenseil.
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