Liquid Chocolate Factory Leak Floods German Street

An overflowing storage tank at DreiMeister’s chocolate factory covered a street in Werl, Germany, with molten chocolate.

“About a ton of chocolate ran out into the yard and from there onto the street,” a spokesman for the Werl Fire Brigade said in a statement. “A ten-square-meter choco-pancake formed,” the statement added. And while that might sound like a sweet tooth dream come true, cleaning it up was a bit of a nightmare.

DreiMeister’s boss, Markus Luckey, told German newspaper Soester Anzeiger it “would have been a disaster” if it had happened any closer to Christmas. All told, it took 25 firemen and a cleaning specialist company to clean up the “sweet danger with shovels and muscle power,” making the road safe for travel again.

Luckey said he expects the factory to be operational by Wednesday, and the fire brigade assured the locals that a Christmas without chocolate was not “imminent.”