Sunday morning traffic near Point Judith took an unexpectedly briny turn when a tractor-trailer hauling roughly two tons of squid tipped onto its side, spilling its entire load across the intersection of Point Judith and Galilee Escape roads in Narragansett.
Police say the crash happened around 9:27 a.m. as the driver negotiated a turn and the trailer separated from the cab, rolling onto the pavement. No one was hurt — the driver and a passenger in the cab walked away unscathed, and no other vehicles were involved. What followed was a logistical headache: thousands of pounds of squid baking on hot asphalt in mid-August sun.
And here in Narragansett, we're still recovering from The Squidpocalypse of '26 — the spill that put "slippery when wet" to shame.
Narragansett Police Department, on social media
Narragansett Fire, Rhode Island State Police's Commercial Enforcement Unit, the state Department of Transportation and the Department of Environmental Management all responded to help clear the mess, using heavy equipment and a dump truck to scrape the catch off the road. Capt. Ryan Prest told NBC News that the smell "started to get bad" as the squid sat in the sun for hours, and that citations for the driver "may be issued at some point," though none had been filed as of midweek.
The road reopened around 5:15 p.m., roughly eight hours after the crash. Local residents, including a nearby fisherman who said he uses squid as bait, described the odor as distinctive and, in this quantity, overwhelming. Narragansett — a fishing and beach town about 30 miles south of Providence — has leaned into the joke rather than away from it, and the police department's social post has racked up shares across New England news outlets and beyond.
Squid spills are rarer on U.S. roads than the seafood-truck genre suggests, but they are not unheard of: overturned trailers carrying frozen shellfish and crab have closed highways in other coastal states in past years. This one, cleanup crews say, was among the largest.