Photo courtesy DreiMeister
Earlier this week, the streets of Westönnen, a small suburb of Werl in western Germany, went full Augustus Gloop when more than a metric ton of milk chocolate spilled out of a storage tank and immediately hardened into a delicious, impassable, 108-square-foot mess.The spill appears to have been the result of a leaky tank valve at DreiMeister, a local chocolate manufacturer.
“That chocolate was supposed to go into our truffles, chocolate bars and chocolate coins,” Fabian Steiner, a spokesperson for DreiMeister, told MUNCHIES. He added that the amount lost shouldn’t ruin Christmas—while unfortunate, it’s a drop in the bucket for DreiMeister, who go through about 400 tons of chocolate per year.The street remained closed for nearly two hours while approximately 25 firemen and a handful DreiMeister employees cleaned the street with hot water, a roofing torch, shovels, and “Muskelkraft” (German for elbow grease). “I think one of our neighbors must have called the fire department,” Steiner says, though he remains unclear on whether the firefighters ate any of the street chocolate: “They say no, but I’m not sure if you can trust that.”In the end, DreiMeister resumed manufacturing activities on Wednesday morning and sent a big basket of chocolate to the fire department. In a statement on their website Werl’s finest wrote that, “Despite the heartbreaking incident, it is unlikely that a chocolate-free Christmas is imminent in Werl.”
