Who doesn’t love a good bowl of noodles? One of the easiest and cheapest meals on the planet, microwaved noodles are the king of college snacks. But on this fateful day in Arkansas, one truck driver crashed into a lake while carrying 20,000 pounds of ramen noodles and almost made the world’s biggest soup.

The Arkansas ramen noodle truck debacle

Earlier this week, a semi-truck carrying 20,000 pounds of ramen noodles ended up taking a dip in Arkansas’s Lake Conway. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission was on the scene to ensure no humans or fish were hurt in the accident. Miraculously, no humans or fish were hurt. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission noted that the 18-wheeler was partially submerged in the lake at Arkansas Highway 89 and Interstate 40 in Faulkner County.

The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality and a HAZMAT crew were called to the area to clean up the noodley mess. The truck was fairly unscathed after the incident, and so were the noodles. A wrecker was able to pull the truck out of the lake and found that the lake was not impacted by the accident.

According to the local KARK news station, crews were on the scene to help clear out the truck. The team can be seen walking boxes of noodles from the back of the semi-truck to a nearby dumpster. Goodbye forever, chicken-flavored noodles.

How much does 20,000 pounds of ramen noodles in a truck cost?

This math could be totally wrong, but let’s take a step at it. Each regular Maruchan Ramen Noodle Soup package is three ounces. In the KARK photos, large boxes of ramen noodles are visible being removed from the truck. These noodles often come in 12 packs, which would be 36 ounces.

Each box likely carried two 12-packs, making each box around 72 ounces of noodles. That’s 4.5 pounds of noodles per box. If there were 20,000 pounds of ramen noodles in the truck, that’s an estimated 4,444 boxes of noodles.

If we take the 12 noodles per pack, times two packs per box, we have 106,666 individual noodle packs. Divide that by 12. One of these 12-packs costs $2.27 at Walmart, which would make this about 8,888 boxes of ramen noodles. If we honor the 12-pack price at Walmart, that’s around $20,177 worth of ramen noodles in the large truck. If these were individual packets of noodles, the price is just over $26,666 in noodles.

Semi-trucks have a lot of room

One single semi-truck is usually around 72 feet long and weighs around 80,000 pounds. That’s a lot of room for noodles. In 2018, ABC News reported that a 53-foot truck filled with $98,000 worth of ramen noodles was stolen from a gas station.

Perhaps this truck was filled with Shin Ramyun Black ramen noodles, which go for $1.29 per pack at Target. Either way, that’s a lot of noodles. It wasn’t reported if authorities caught the noodle truck thief, but wherever the soup-stealing-bandit went, he likely wished the truck was filled with something a bit more lucrative.

Either way, the accident harmed no lakes or people in the ramen noodle truck incident. Shout out to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission for taking swift action to ensure the driver, passenger, fish, and noodles were OK.