M1 Marmite spill among Highway Agency's top 10 sticky situations

THE slogan has it that you either love Marmite or hate it — and motorists suffering from a sticky spill were certainly in the second camp.

The 20-tonne yeast extract puddle on the M1 in South Yorkshire has been listed among the Highways Agency’s ten strangest spillages.

The agency compiled its top ten to draw attention to the weird and wonderful work it has to do to keep the roads moving, and the sticky situation between the Catcliffe and M18 junctions back in 2011 — which took specialist teams 12 hours to clean up — made the cut.

Also on the list of usual items blocking the roads were raw human sewage, 6,000 chickens, hundreds of tins of baked beans, thousands of lager cans, ten tonnes of salmon, melamine formaldehyde resin and phosphoric acid, animal blood, Refrigerated liquid oxygen and powdered cement.

An agency spokesman said: “The unexpected nature of motorway incidents means it can be hard to plan for what may happen on any given day.

“Over the past few years, there have been numerous spills, ranging from the strange to the dangerous.

“In every case, Highways England teams have worked quickly, and under pressure, to remove debris, clean the road, and fix damage before safely reopening the carriageway to drivers.

“In some cases, thousands of items had to be picked up by hand after spreading across several lanes of the motorway.

“We compiled this list to help drivers understand the challenges of safely clearing up after an incident.”

Melanie Clarke, director of customer operations at Highways England, added: “We know drivers get frustrated when their journeys are disrupted but we do all we can to clean the road quickly after an incident, and it’s often much more complicated than simply moving the vehicles off the road to reopen it.

“That’s why it can often take longer for us to safely reopen roads when a potentially dangerous substance is spilled in an incident.

“Our teams expect the unexpected, but of course, when you're dealing with ten tonnes of salmon, dangerous toxic chemicals, or emulsion paint, the clean-up operation is somewhat complicated.”

The agency’s biggest enemy is the rather more mundance diesel, which creates a chemical reaction with asphalt and causes the road surface to rot, requiring hi-tech hydroblasters to completely clean the road.

And milk poses similar problem, rotting the road, sticking to the surfacen and becoming very slippery in wet weather.