An Associated Press story in my hometown paper last Friday was labeled “oddity,” which it is to most of the eating public. They’d wonder why, in a world where billions of people go hungry every day, a trailerload of meat worth $80,000 went to waste. It’s the fault of one uncaring truck driver, as it turns out.

Christopher Hall, 42, picked up a load of frozen chicken in Arkansas and was supposed to deliver it to Washington state by the next day (isn’t that kinda pushing it?) but along the way got into an argument with his company over money. He wanted a bigger advance, the dispatcher said no, so he dropped the trailer at a truckstop in Montana and took off.

The article included a photo of juices running out of the trailer’s rear doors. Imagine how that smelled, after who-knows-how-long the chicken sat in there, thawing after the reefer ran out of fuel, then rotting as it heated up. You’d think the smell would’ve attracted attention sooner, but no one in Missoula, where the truckstop is, knows how long the trailer was there, according to the story.

A short follow-up item on Saturday said the trailer was towed to a landfill, where the rotten contents were dumped in a freshly dug hole and covered up. Rest in peace.

Another article said the load had been reported missing August 27, so it may have been sitting there for more than a month.

I’d call this a good argument for trailer tracking, either with a stand-alone device or through the reefer’s telematics system. Or simply for the truckstop’s security people to pay attention to what they see. A lone reefer trailer just sitting there is not normal. After a few days shouldn’t they have called someone somewhere about it?

This reminds me of a complete tractor-trailer I spotted parked along a highway in northern San Diego County about 20 years ago. The tractor was owned by a major leasing company and the drop-floor trailer was lettered for a moving and storage company back in the Midwest. The police apparently didn’t bother with it because it was well away from the pavement.

By the third day I got to wondering just why it was still there, and began suspecting that it was abandoned. So I called an executive at the leasing company, whom I knew through the Technology & Maintenance Council of the American Trucking Associations, told him about it, and gave him the tractor’s unit number.

He said that strictly speaking, his company really wasn’t too concerned because the tractor was on a lease and it was the customer’s responsibility to keep track of it. But he checked it out anyway, and called me the next day with the news that yes, the rig was abandoned by a disgruntled driver, his bosses didnn't know where it was, and that there was some family’s household goods in the trailer.

I noted that the family would probably be glad to learn where most of its worldly possessions were, and he agreed.

Now my final point – and one made by the Department of Homeland Security about suspicious things: "If you see something, say something." Security people worry about bombs and stuff, but maybe we ought to care about stray trailers that just might carry something valuable.