Paint spill coats major Montreal highway in white, closing road for hours-long cleanup

A heavy truck spilled a load of paint across Highway 40 on Tuesday morning, staining the road white and prompting a massive cleanup and traffic jam.

The eastbound highway reopened as afternoon rush hour was getting under way, just after 4 p.m. 

The truck dropped its load of paint when the driver braked suddenly, just after 8 a.m., a spokesperson for Quebec's provincial police force, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), said.

The paint spilled across the eastbound lanes of the highway between Cavendish and Côte-Vertu boulevards, a Transports Québec spokesperson said. 

Vehicles drove through the spilled paint, their white tire tracks coating much of the highway and obscuring lane markers for hundreds of metres, according to images of the scene.  

The SQ is investigating whether the paint was properly secured inside the truck and said the driver could receive a fine if it wasn't. 

WATCH | Wet paint on Highway 40: 

Transport truck dumps paint all over Montreal highway

1 year ago

Duration 0:42

Highway 40 eastbound was shut down after a truck accidentally spilled its massive load of white paint.

It was a massive spill, the Transports Québec spokesperson said, and kept the highway closed for six hours as cleanup crews worked to get the paint off the highway. 

A traffic jam extended more than a kilometre east of Côte-Vertu as of 3 p.m., but began to dissipate as Transports  Québec began to let cars through one of the right-hand lanes in the area. 

Quebec's Urgence-Environment agency called in vacuum trucks, street-cleaning vehicles and workers with pressure washers to remove the paint from the roadway. Some of it had seeped into a sewer but most of it dried on the road and it was water-based, which made the cleanup easier than if it had been oil-based, the agency said.

The environmental impact of the spill was minimal, Urgence-Environnement said.