And once they looked at their cars and trucks, most of the drivers barely recognized their vehicles.

“It was black,” Cheryl Theno said of her gold 1998 Mercury Mystic. “You couldn’t see the bottom of my car anywhere. Even the back bumper was messed up.”

The culprit was a road construction project on 24-40.

But the company that was working on the road has offered to clean any vehicles that were driven through the muck.

Vance Brothers of Kansas City was working Thursday between Tonganoxie and the Leavenworth-Wyandotte county line.

“They did a chip and seal on the highway,” said Penny White, receptionist for Vance Brothers who’s fielded hundreds of complaints since Friday morning. “They had checked the weather forecasters and they said there weren’t going to be any showers.”

So workers went ahead and applied seal, which usually takes about 30 minutes to set. But then the rain started.

“When it rains on that before it has a chance to set up, it makes it run,” White said.

Once it began to rain, the problem was clear to highway crews, White said, and they didn’t have time to put out cones to divert drivers from the soupy mess.

“They knew they were going to have this,” White said. “There wasn’t anything they could do to prevent it.”

So Vance Brothers workers spent Friday, Saturday and Tuesday cleaning cars — lots of cars. Workers sprayed a product called Tarbuster on vehicles to dissolve the black film.

“We’ve washed around 260 cars,” project supervisor Trever Anger said about noon Tuesday. “We’ll go until we get our last car done.”

The company still is fielding calls from motorists with tarred cars.

“It’s mostly just the tar,” Anger said. “We’ve had a couple of windshields that have little divots in them.”

Theno’s car was among those with damaged windshields.

“I got a lot of chips in my windshield from it,” she said. “It also messed the paint up on my car. They told me to take it down to S&S and I got an estimate and I’m supposed to turn that in and they’re supposed to fix everything on the car. They kept apologizing and they cleaned it all up.”

Theno and others said company employees couldn’t have been nicer to work with.

“It was great, and they took really good care of the car,” she said.

And Anger said motorists were understanding about the problem.

“Everyone’s been really easy to get along with,” he said. “We can’t do anything about the weather, but we sure can take care of things that happen when the weather doesn’t cooperate with us. We’ll do everything we can so the public is satisfied.”