Spaghetti Junction? Lorry crash causes tomato puree and olive oil spillage

Social media users poke fun at unusual road accident in the UK

Tomato puree strewn across the A14 motorway after a lorry crash in Godmanchester, the UK. Cambridgeshire Police/Twitter

A busy road in England turned bright red after a lorry crash caused a spillage of tomato puree and olive oil.

Two lorries collided on Tuesday evening on the A14 motorway in Cambridgeshire.

Police said the scene resembled a “horror film” after one of the jack-knifed trucks spilled tonnes of olive oil and tomato sauce all over the road.

Social media users could not resist weighing in with puns, with one calling it "a disaster, puree simple".

Craig Lyons wrote: “I went pasta that. Took a while for the traffic to ketchup.”

Another Twitter user said: “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, while another noted traffic had started to “ketchup after the delay”.

The driver of one of the two trucks was taken to hospital but he has since been discharged.

Highways England said the road needed to temporarily close for emergency resurfacing work after the accident.

It is not the first road spill to make headlines. In 2018 in Germany, a tonne of chocolate needed to be shovelled off a road after it spilled out of a storage tank and hardened on contact with the cold surface.

The German incident was the second chocolate spill in 2018 after Polish firefighters spent hours removing 12 tonnes of liquid milk chocolate on a motorway after a lorry overturned.

In the US state of Oregon the year before, several cars were “slimed” after 3,400 kilograms of hagfish spilled from an overturned lorry.