A stretch of road in England was left looking like a scene from a “horror film” after a lorry crash spilled tomato puree across the tarmac on Tuesday.
A 23-mile section of the westbound carriageway of the A14 from Cambridge to Brampton was closed after the collision between two lorries. Cambridgeshire police tweeted:
What looked like the set of a horror film was actually thousands of squashed tomatoes. The incident on the A14 at Godmanchester yesterday evening involved two jack-knifed lorries, including one carrying tons of olive oil and tomatoes. The road reopened just before 1pm today. pic.twitter.com/xRNJ7gMpxk
— Cambs Police 💙 (@CambsCops) June 2, 2021
The Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire roads policing unit confirmed two vehicles had been involved and that one driver had been injured, though not seriously. BBC News reported the driver had been discharged from hospital. The unit said an investigation into the incident was ongoing.
Several people made light of the spill, with one tweeting: “I went pasta that. Took a while for the traffic to ketchup.”
Another joked: “And I imagine when it does reopen cars will have to passata slow speed?” Others said it was fortunate that the crash didn’t take place at Spaghetti Junction.
The road closure was lifted at 2.03pm on Wednesday. Before the road was reopened, a spokesman for Highways England said: “Emergency resurfacing work is taking place where the incident occurred around 7.10pm yesterday evening, involving two HGVs, one of which lost its load and damaged the carriageway.”
It is far from the first unusual road spill to make headlines. In Germany in 2018, about two dozen firefighters had to use shovels to scrape a tonne of chocolate off a road after it spilled out of a storage tank and hardened on contact with the cold surface.
In the US state of Oregon the year before, several cars were “slimed” after 3,400kg of hagfish spilled on to the road when a truck overturned.