Chocolate leak closes German street

A street in Germany was paved in chocolate yesterday after a spillage at a factory.

Emergency services were called after a tank of chocolate in a factory spilled and poured into the street.

The German newspaper Soester Anzeiger reported that a “small technical defect” involving a storage tank caused the chocolate to spill out from the DreiMeister chocolate factory in Westonnen.

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The chocolate mass “travelled across the factory yard and onto the street”, news website The Local reported.

After hitting the cold pavement, the milk chocolate quickly hardened and 25 firefighters worked to pry it off with shovels. About 10 sq m (108 sq ft) was cleared and the firefighters “also used hot water and torches to remove remaining bits from cracks and holes”, reports The Guardian.

The road had to be closed for two hours so that emergency services and a specialist cleaning company could get to work scraping the chocolate off and cleaning the street.

Production has begun again already at the factory with company boss Markus Luckey, telling Soester Anzeiger that a failure at the chocolate manufacturer shortly before Christmas during peak production period “would have been a catastrophe”.

“I'm glad nothing happened at the end of the day,” said Luckey. He added that he didn’t know exactly what happened to the tank but added: “It was only a small thing. There was no major damage.”