Cheese Friday: Cheese Disaster

Driver escapes injury after cheese truck crashes

Radio Iowa - Des Moines,IA,USA
by Stella Shaffer

A Storm Lake trucker escaped without serious injury yesterday (Wednesday) when high winds upset his rig on Highway 9. The driver had left from the dairy manufacturing plant at Sanborn, and Sheryl Meschke with Associated Milk Producers says he was hauling processed milk products. It was carrying 37-thousand-750-pounds of cheddar cheese, nearly a full load, from the plant in Sanborn to a processor in Wisconsin, and the truck was overturned. The driver was briefly trapped in the cab but was able to get out with help from a passerby who smashed the windshield of the semi and helped him climb out. Meschke says going by prices yesterday on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the value of the product was about a dollar-59 a pound. That comes out to 60-thousand dollars for the load. The cheese was loaded in the tractor-trailer in the form of 700-pound blocks. Dairy company managers will have to decide whether the cheese can be salvaged. The driver, Floyd Patton of Storm Lake, is quoted as saying everyone should wear seatbelts, as he was doing, because it would keep them safer in accidents. AMPI is a regional cooperative of 4,600 dairy farms in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota Wisconsin, and North and South Dakota. It operates fourteen manufacturing plants and is a major cheddar producers as well as producing 60-percent of al the instant milk sold in the US. It makes more than 5-Billion pounds of milk a year into butter, cheese and other solid milk products.