Morton Salt Building Collapse Pours Crazy Amounts Of Salt On Next-Door Acura Dealership

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Well-known brand name slogans don’t come any bigger than Morton Salt’s “When It Rains, It Pours.” It’s such an integral part of the brand that it’s actually been paired up with the Morton umbrella girl since 1914. Unsurprisingly, this means that the umbrella girl—and the slogan—show up on everything to do with Morton Salt, including their storage buildings. 

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That fact adds another dimension to yesterday’s wall collapse of a Morton Salt storage facility in Chicago. DNAInfo Chicago spoke to workers at the McGrath Acura dealer next door, where 11 cars were crushed and probably totaled by the collapsing wall and ensuing salty avalanche. The workers said that it started with some bricks falling, followed by a loud BOOM as the wall collapsed.

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McGrath Acura General Manager Noble Jones told DNAInfo Chicago:

“Initially we ran and panicked because we thought the rest of the wall was going to come down with it, and then after a while we snuck back out and took a peek at it.”

Employee Bernardo Macedo said, 

“I heard a big boom. It sounded like a car accident, then the bricks from the top of the wall started to come down on top of the cars and the salt started to pour out.

11 cars on the McGrath Acura lot were crushed by the wall and salt, but no one was injured. The cars belonged to customers who had dropped them off at the Acura dealer for service. After the incident, the Acura dealer was working to contact the customers whose cars had most likely been totaled. DNAInfo Chicago reports that one customer, a 60 year old man named Michael Cristofano, had dropped his car off for an oil change yesterday morning.

Cristofano was remarkably calm about the whole thing. When he found out, he said, “What can you do? Things happen.”

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Morton has contacted McGrath Acura and is working with them to clean up all the salt and wreckage. Jones said he hopes the salt will be cleared up by Saturday or Sunday.

If the salt is still out there over the weekend, it might actually be helpful. As we write this, there’s a 60% chance of snow in the forecast from Saturday into Sunday.

Photo: National Weather Service

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