Salt, Salt Everywhere

Nothing terribly exciting happens often on Goose Island in Chicago, Illinois, but residents of the city's artificial island witnessed something pretty peculiar on Tuesday afternoon, after a wall of the Chicago Morton Salt building collapsed, sending an avalanche of, um, salt, onto cars at an Acura dealership next door. There were no injuries, save for possibly the automobiles.

Shortly past 2 p.m. local time, a section of the Morton Salt storage facility, close to Potomac and Elston avenues, crumpled, and salt poured out of the building onto about a dozen cars at the dealership lot, the Chicago Tribune reported. Morton Salt is known for being the unlikely source of the famous saying "When It Rains, It Pours," after Don Draper's real-life counterparts came up with it for the company's ads in the early 1900s. The slogan was emblazoned below the company's name on the roof of the other side of the building, along with the logo of the Morton Salt girl.

Peter Muller, who works close to the Morton Salt building and heard a "boom" when the wall crashed, told Yahoo News via email:

It’s really a shocking sight to see; the massive mountains of salt are exposed now and the wall around the collapse is buckling. Seeing the cars buried beneath the huge flow of salt gives it scale and it’s honestly hard to stop staring at.

Muller also posted a picture on Instagram of the incident.

Right?! That's an incredible amount of salt. And having it gush out like that bears the question of why the salt — much of which will eventually find its way into our mouth — wasn't stored in a container of some sort? Did the factory just have a giant mound of salt leaning on the wall? Could that be a health violation?

Muller continued in his email:

I’ve been working here since September and it’s always been part of our nice office view watching the enormous barges of salt float down the river to get unloaded daily into the factory. The sheer volume of salt going through the factory on a daily basis is really amazing.

Naturally, Twitter lit up with salt-related humor.

Although it wasn't clear what caused the wall to collapse, Denise Lauer, director of communications at Morton Salt Inc., said in a statement:

A side wall of our storage facility on Elston Avenue in Chicago collapsed this afternoon, spilling road salt outside of the facility and onto a neighboring property. We are working with local authorities to review and respond to the situation. There are no reported injuries. We will provide additional details as appropriate.

Image: CBS News/Screenshot