A truckload of potatoes closed Interstate 40 for nearly twelve hours. Two months later Tennessee signed an agreement that set a ninety-minute goal. The obvious story is that the crash created the power to clear the road. The obvious story is wrong, and the real one is better.
This lab did not start from a document. It started from a fifteen-year-old half-memory — something about a potato truck and a state finally getting the authority to drag wrecks off the interstate — carrying the wrong decade and the wrong county.
Running it down took a wrong turn through a better-photographed crash in another state before landing on the actual press release. All three stages are on this page, in order, because the chase is half the lesson.
A truck carrying potatoes crashed on Interstate 40 in Wilson County, Tennessee, in December 2011. The state’s own account of what followed is one sentence long and does all the work:
“…an incident in December 2011 that closed Interstate 40 in Wilson County for nearly 12 hours, leaving hundreds of motorists stranded overnight.”TDOT press release, 16 February 2012
Not a fatality, not a hazmat release, not a bridge strike. A load of potatoes. Wilson County is immediately east of Nashville — this is not a remote stretch of road. Hundreds of people sat in their cars on an interstate overnight because of vegetables.
Two months later, the Commissioners of two state departments stood together and signed something.
Search for a potato truck on a highway and the results do not hand you Tennessee. They hand you North Carolina.
On 6 May 2016, around 2 a.m., a tractor-trailer carrying 50,000 pounds of potatoes overturned on Interstate 77 South in Charlotte, at West Boulevard. Troopers said the driver fell asleep and hit a barrier. Crews cleared the road with tractors and snowplows. A WSOC-TV reporter called it “flash spudding,” crediting a producer for the pun, and NPR carried it nationally the same day.
Most of the load was contaminated by a fuel spill. A few hundred pounds that landed in grass near an exit ramp were clean, and were donated to a gleaning group.
Charlotte has snowplows pushing mountains of potatoes at dawn. Tennessee has a sentence in a government press release.
One of those two events changed how a state clears its interstates. It is not the one with the photographs.
Consequence and photogenicity are unrelated variables, and search ranks on the second one. A good picture buys a decade of top results; a policy change buys a PDF nobody links to.
The correction came from narrowing the window rather than widening the search — restricting to roughly 2010–2018 instead of asking better keywords. The right answer was never missing. It was outranked.
TDOT Commissioner John Schroer and Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons signed an interagency agreement on quick clearance. The release names the cause without hedging:
“Following the potato truck crash in December, we made a promise to the public that we would initiate changes to avoid this type of situation in the future. We now have specific guidelines that can dramatically reduce the time it takes to clear major incidents from our interstates and major highways.”Commissioner John Schroer
| The procedure | What it is really for |
|---|---|
| Classifies incidents as major, intermediate, or minor | Decides up front how much gets mobilised, instead of discovering it hour by hour |
| Reassessment every 30 minutes | Stops a scene from drifting. Somebody has to look up and ask again |
| Wreckers must bring equipment of appropriate size, capacity & design | The wrong-sized truck is the classic twelve-hour cause |
| Towing companies will not delay to off-load cargo or recover a damaged vehicle | The potatoes come second. Move the load, sort it later |
| Safety notifies TDOT of any closure over 30 minutes — through THP Dispatch | TDOT cannot stage what it has not been told about |
| Both agencies deploy their own equipment and manpower when the wrecker on scene is delayed or outmatched | The teeth. The state stops waiting on a contractor it is not required to wait for |
| 90-minute goal to clear the roadway, timed from the arrival of the first responding officer | A number you can be measured against, which is the point of a number |
Summaries of this agreement usually carry the classification, the 30-minute reassessment, the equipment rule, the cargo rule and the 90 minutes. They drop the notification duty and the deploy-your-own-equipment clause — which are the two that actually change what happens at 3 a.m. on a closed interstate.
The first four tell people how to think about the scene. These two are the ones that put a state crane on the road.
Oversight sits with both Commissioners, the Tennessee Highway Patrol Colonel, and the TDOT Chief Engineer — four names, so there is somebody to answer for it.
Everything above had been read out of the press release. The agreement itself — the file whose own link is dead (Tab 05) — has now been read line by line. All seven procedures are in it. Three of them are in it differently enough to matter, and the table above now carries the document’s wording rather than the summary’s.
The ninety minutes appears three times, at three different sizes. Paragraph 5 requires wrecker equipment sized “to clear the travel portions of the roadway within 90 minutes, unless extenuating circumstances such as the presence of hazardous materials, serious bodily injury or a fatality exists.” The objectives table promises it for major incidents, “when possible.” Paragraph 32 states it flatly for all incidents. One number, three different promises.
And it was already timed from the first officer’s arrival. This page said the 2022 MOU measures from that point, which implied the anchor was a later refinement. Paragraph 32 of the 2012 document says “within ninety (90) minutes of the arrival of the first responding officer.” It was there on day one. Corrected in Tab 05.
Notification is neither immediate nor direct. Paragraph 30: TDOSHS notifies THP Dispatch, who then notify TDOT, of any situation calling for a lane closure past thirty minutes — “See Appendix 2.” There is no Appendix 2 in the file. Page nine is Appendix 1; the next page is Appendix 3. The contact list the whole notification duty routes through is the one thing the published agreement does not contain.
The teeth clause has two triggers, not one. Paragraph 26 puts state equipment on the road “if there is a delay in clearing the travel lanes, or if the task is beyond the capabilities of the tow company / wrecker service on the scene.” Taking too long is sufficient by itself. Nobody has to prove the wrecker was the wrong size.
The last sentence before the signatures:
“This Memorandum of Understanding is not an enforceable agreement among the parties but is a statement of cooperative intent. In no matter, whether directly or indirectly, does this MOU establish a standard of care or in any way create third party beneficiary rights.”Interagency MOU, page 8
So the ninety minutes is not a duty anyone can sue over, and sitting in the twelfth hour buys you no claim. The accountability the document does build is internal, and it runs upward. Paragraph 32: if the ninety minutes is unattainable, a report on conditions and expected clearance time goes to the on-duty supervisor or the Incident Commander every thirty minutes, and into TDOT’s SmartWay system. Paragraph 28: any Interstate closure over two hours, or any lane closure over five, triggers an after-action review within ten working days and a joint one-page report to both Commissioners — a review whose stated purpose is “not to find fault or to assign blame.”
The December 2011 closure ran about twelve hours. The procedure written because of it would have been set off by it six times over. That is what this agreement is: not a law with a penalty, but a standing promise that somebody upstairs now has to be told.
Ninety minutes is the same kind of object as a yellow light. Down the hall, The Crossing makes the case that the yellow interval is “a number, not a courtesy” — a published figure derived from approach speed and the width of the box, not a driver’s sense of how long feels polite.
The ninety-minute clearance goal is that same move applied to the other end of the incident. Before it, how long a road stayed shut was a judgement call that only looked like one. After it, it is a figure that has to be reported against every thirty minutes when it is missed — which, as the agreement itself is careful to say, is not the same as enforceable.
Two numbers, one road: one decides whether you should be in the intersection, the other decides how long you sit behind the wreck of somebody who was.
Every procedure in that agreement is a decision somebody makes at a scene. Here they are as four gates. Pick the pre-2012 answer at each one and watch how you get to twelve hours — not through disaster, but through four reasonable-sounding choices.
This is an illustration, not a reconstruction. It is not a model of the December 2011 incident and nobody has published a minute-by-minute account of that night. The base time and the four penalties below are chosen by this page to show the shape of the problem, and every number is printed so you can argue with it.
Best path: 25 + 0 + 0 + 20 + 15 = 60 minutes, inside the goal. Worst path: 25 + 45 + 90 + 240 + 300 = 700 minutes, which is eleven hours and forty minutes. That the worst path lands near the real twelve hours is a choice this page made, not a finding.
The natural reading of this story — and the one the half-memory carried — is that the crash embarrassed the state into granting itself new authority to push, pull and drag wrecks off the road. That is not what happened.
Tennessee’s current quick-clearance agreement says where its power comes from, and it is not the agreement:
“Agencies will carry out the processes and procedures for removal of vehicles, spilled cargo, or other personal property as outlined in TCA § 54-16-113.”Open Roads Policy MOU, 16 June 2022
As outlined in. The agreement operates under the statute. It does not create anything.
And TCA § 54-16-113 was enacted by Acts 2000, ch. 806. Since 2000 it has empowered “the department of safety, department of transportation, or local law enforcement agency” to remove vehicles and spilled cargo obstructing a controlled-access highway.
The paperwork. For eleven years the authority sat on the books without an agreed procedure for using it — no classification, no clock, no duty to notify, no rule about whose crane shows up. Schroer’s own word for what the state gained is “guidelines.”
A law nobody has written a procedure for is a law that does not get used at 3 a.m. It took a truckload of potatoes and several hundred stranded motorists to get two departments to write down who does what.
“Open Roads Policy” is a later name. The February 2012 document’s own title is Interagency Memorandum of Understanding between Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security and Tennessee Department of Transportation, Relative to Urgent Clearance of Highway Incidents and Safety at Incident Scenes — the words “Open Roads” appear nowhere in its fifteen pages. The 2022 MOU’s own supersession clause lists both ancestors — the agreement signed 2/16/12, and separate Open Roads Policy agreements signed 10/12/2012, eight months later. The current version dates from 16 June 2022 and still carries the ninety minutes, measured — then as now — from the arrival of the first responding officer.
It is not immunity. These are often filed with “Move It” and “Steer It, Clear It” laws as legal cover to shove wreckage aside without fear of being sued. Tennessee’s statute does the opposite — it assigns liability: state agencies under Title 9, chapter 8, part 3; local law enforcement under the Governmental Tort Liability Act. It also lets the agency bill the owner and the carrier for the cost of removal. The state is not protected from the consequences of clearing your load. It is authorised, and then invoiced.
The 2012 MOU reprints § 54-16-113 in full as its Appendix 4 — and then, in its own first numbered paragraph, restates it wrong:
“No removal shall occur until the investigating law enforcement officer determines that adequate information has been obtained for preparation of an accident report (TCA 54-16-113 (b) (1).”MOU body, paragraph 1
The statute at (b)(1) says something much narrower. Its default is that vehicles and cargo “may be removed to any place within the immediate vicinity without any further action or obligation” — and the hold-for-the-report applies only “in the event of a motor vehicle accident which results in apparent serious personal injury or death.”
Drop that qualifier and a rule written for fatal wrecks becomes a rule for every scene. The one place the quick-clearance agreement misquotes its own source, it misquotes it in the direction of leaving the road shut longer — against the entire purpose of the document, in the document’s first numbered line, with the correct text stapled to the back of the same file.
The 2012 press release still tells readers to view the agreement at tn.gov/tdot/incident/docs/MOU-TDOT-TDOSHS-Feb-14-2012.pdf. That tree is gone; the living document sits under traffic-operations/transportation-management-office/quick-clearance-mous/.
The press release points at a recipe that moved. Not withdrawn, not retracted — relocated, while everything that ever cited it keeps pointing at the old shelf. Fourteen years is a long time for a URL. See The Kitchen.
Update · 23 September 2026: a copy surfaced. The file is on disk and has now been read in full; Tab 03 carries the result. The relocated tree holds the current MOU only — the 2012 document is not there under any name. And the filename is not a signature date. …Feb-14-2012.pdf says the 14th; the signature page says the Commissioner of Safety signed 2/10/12 and the other three — Transportation, the THP Colonel, the Chief Engineer — all signed 2/16/12, the day it was announced. The 2022 supersession clause cites 2/16/12, and it is the one that is right.
Incident clearance is one of the few pieces of public infrastructure whose failures every driver has personally sat in. It is also one where the useful change is invisible: no ribbon, no new lane, just a list of seven procedures and a number somebody has to account for. This lab exists because the interesting part of the story turned out to be the part the retelling had backwards.
● Real. Every date, name, quotation, procedure and code section above, read out of the documents themselves rather than out of coverage. The twelve hours and the hundreds of stranded motorists are the state’s own description of its own incident.
◐ Mine. The four gates and every number in the clock — the 25-minute base and the 45 / 90 / 240 / 300-minute penalties are invented to show the shape of the problem, and the fact that the worst path lands near twelve hours is a choice, not a result. Also mine: the reading that the agreement supplied procedure rather than power, the point about consequence versus photogenicity, and the framing throughout.
Closed 23 September 2026. The February 2012 agreement has now been read in full, and the seven procedures check out against it — three of them with corrections, all recorded in Tab 03 rather than quietly folded in. What is still open is smaller and more specific:
Appendix 2 is missing from the published file. It is the dispatch contact list the notification duty routes through, and the document cites it three times. Whether it was never published, or is withheld as internal, is not something this page can tell.
The 10/12/2012 Open Roads Policy agreements have not been read — the ones that actually carry the name. Only the 2022 supersession clause that names them.
Whether an after-action review was ever held for the December 2011 closure. The requirement was written the following February, so nothing obliged one. If a one-page report to the two Commissioners exists, it is the document this entire lab is about.