It looks like the remnants of a LEGO video game smashup superimposed over dreary reality: a debris field of tiny plastic bricks strewn across a West Virginia highway, shutting it down and causing serious delays.
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The spill occurred along a stretch of Interstate 79 near Clarksburg this weekend, closing off one lane of traffic during what were already cold, wet driving conditions.
The first indication of trouble appeared on the North Central and Central WV Working Fires Facebook page early Sunday evening, noting reports of LEGO blocks stopping up traffic, and — tongue apparently in cheek — that a fire engine was on scene with area police “trying to make a traffic arrow with the blocks.”
Another report from local Fox affiliate WDTV noted that “Around 5:15 Sunday afternoon, there was a roadway obstruction of LEGO blocks on I-79 around mile marker 117 in Harrison County” and that traffic had dropped to one lane “until crews could clean up the mess.” One commenter on the WDTV report joked:
“I saw this happen. A giant lego man was driving a car made out of legos, lost control, hit the guardrail, and exploded into a thousand pieces. Investigators are trying to reconstruct the scene, and the car.”
By Monday evening, the mother of the child whose LEGOs apparently caused the crisis had arrived to sort things out, writing on the same Facebook page that the LEGOs belonged to her 11-year-old son, that they’d been in tote bags strapped to the top of her SUV and that they went flying when those straps came loose. “[He] cried it seemed like forever but I tried to recover as many as I could cause I don’t have the money to buy him anymore,” she wrote.
In a heartwarming followup, several passersby onFacebook have since reached out to the mother, offering to send along their LEGOs to help her son “rebuild his collection.”