Cheese balls take the 105, and Lynwood briefly goes grocery shopping

What happened

Los Angeles has a long menu of freeway problems. Cheese balls are a new special. On Tuesday, shortly after 5 p.m., a pickup truck carrying pallets of the snacks lost the load on the westbound 105 Freeway in Lynwood, just west of the Long Beach Boulevard on-ramp, and about 120 containers went into the travel lanes. ABC7 Los Angeles, writing Wednesday night, called it an unusual, cheesy traffic incident. Citizen App video showed the mess on the westbound pavement: loose orange balls, intact plastic tubs, and a rush-hour commute that had suddenly acquired a snack aisle. UPI, picking up the same spill on Thursday, identified the cargo as Utz cheese balls. No one was reported hurt. The only casualty was dignity, and possibly a few tubs that did not survive the asphalt.

California Highway Patrol then had to explain the second half of the joke. Officers told ABC7 there were reports of drivers stopping their cars on the freeway to grab tubs that had not broken open. UPI said those extra stops caused extra delays, which is the kind of sentence that should not exist and yet, on the 105, did. Westside Today, working off the same CHP account, described thousands of bright orange cheese balls across the asphalt and a carpool lane that took a temporary timeout. This is not how a grocery run is supposed to work. The 105 is a road. The tubs were cargo. The unbroken ones were still cargo. Several motorists apparently heard “free sample” instead of “do not stop on a freeway at 5 p.m. in Lynwood,” and the orange blizzard got a human harvest on top of the original dump.

Why it matters

The 105, also called the Glenn Anderson Freeway, is one of those east-west chores that already has enough personality without a cheese-ball overlay. Built to stitch the airport side of the county toward Norwalk, it carries a heavy weekday load through Lynwood, which means a pallet that hits the deck after 5 p.m. is not a cute still life. It is a rolling obstacle course with a color story. ABC7’s tape of the westbound lanes is the image that traveled: orange on gray, tubs in the grooves, cars picking their way around a snack that was never meant to be a lane marker. The CHP detail is the one that turned a spill into a local legend. People did not only slow down. Some of them parked the commute and went shopping.

There is a reason this story is funny and a reason it is still a traffic story. Nobody got hurt, which is the line that keeps the item in humor instead of a wreck roundup. Crews did get the pavement cleaned, and ABC7 says all mainlanes reopened. That is the adult ending. The child ending is that a portion of greater Los Angeles spent a Tuesday evening watching grown drivers treat the Century Freeway like a clearance bin. UPI filed it under Odd News, which is the correct drawer. Westside Today noted that how the Utz tubs came to be stranded on the 105 was not further explained. Sometimes a pallet just decides to become public art. Sometimes the public tries to take the art home.

Conclusion

A pickup dumped about 120 tubs of cheese balls on the westbound 105 in Lynwood just after 5 p.m., the westbound lanes went orange, drivers stopped to grab the unbroken ones, CHP sighed into a radio, crews swept, and the freeway remembered how to be a freeway. No injuries. Plenty of jokes. The strip’s four beats are the dump west of Long Beach Boulevard, the snack blizzard in the travel lanes, the rush-hour grocery run that should not have happened, and a cleanup that finally put the cheese back in a bin. That is the humor filing: ABC7 on Aug. 26, UPI on the brand, Lynwood on the map, and a reminder that if you are going to lose a pallet on the 105, maybe do not make it something people want to eat.