A big rig chock full of pennies crashed into a barrier, caught fire and dumped hundreds (thousands?) of dollars worth of the coins all over I-95 in Delaware at around 2 a.m. Thursday. The driver apparently escaped with “minor injuries” but it sure made for a lot of sweeping.
ABC reported that the cause of the crash was still under investigation as morning rush hour got a lot worse for people trying to use the highway. Delaware State Police shut down all lanes of traffic during the initial clean up and only had one lane open by 10 a.m. local time. At this point, the highway seems to be all clear.
Road crews collected the coins with brooms and big boxes. Anybody want to guess how much money was actually in that truck?
Hang on– let’s postulate.
The truck looks like a regular old big rig. Assuming the trailer was a standard 40-foot container, its cargo volume would be 67.6 cubic meters.
Hard to tell how the pennies were stored in the container, but let’s pretend they were just dumped in there like a Scrooge McDuck swimming pool.
A penny’s volume is 0.36 cubic centimeters, so it seems you could fit about 187,777,778 pennies in the box in total. So $1,877,777.78? Man, I should have head down there with my shop-vac!