Tanker Crashes and Spills Liquid Chocolate All Over Highway in Poland

LONDON — Drivers in western Poland were caught in a sticky mess Wednesday after a tanker carrying liquid chocolate overturned and spilled its contents onto the road.

All four lanes of the highway connecting the city of Poznan to Warsaw were covered by the brown goo, footage from the news network TVN24 and social media showed.

It was not immediately clear why the truck, which local reports said had been carrying 12 tons of chocolate, overturned. But it ended up lying across the road, obstructing lanes in both directions.

As the chocolate dried under a mild spring sun, long lines of traffic grew on either side of the spill, and authorities said it would probably be hours before the road was usable again.

“We have to remove the truck from the highway first,” Marlena Kukawka, a media officer for the police in the small town of Slupca, near where the spill occurred, said in a phone interview. “It will take a few hours or more,” she said about the cleanup.

Kukawka said firefighters were using streams of hot water to melt the chocolate and wash away the mess.

Footage on Twitter showed a bulldozer pushing brown sludge away. The slippery surface of solid chocolate on the road is a worse hazard than snow, a spokesman for the fire brigade told TVN24.

The truck belonged to a company from the south of Poland, but it was unclear where it was headed, Kukawka said. The driver, about 60, was being treated for minor injuries, she added.

The stretch of highway rarely sees accidents, according to Kukawka. But spilled chocolate was definitely a first, she said.