Malmö factory fire spills ‘molten lava’ sugar

The company Nordic Sugar said it had already lost 38,000 tonnes of raw sugar in the blaze that began on Wednesday. While the sugar sellers have sent in trucks to remove as much of the stored sugar as possible, a lot of it has already melted in the heat. 

"It's like lava," said emergency services spokesman Bert Åkerberg about the blaze in Svedala, near Malmö. "It's a very tricky situation, and we're also trying to save another sugar storage facility that has 15,000 tonnes. We reckon it could take five days to move it."

The sugar that has already melted has spilled out as far as 150 metres from the destroyed store room. To avoid any environmental damage, emergency services have begun building levees to keep the molten sugar in check.

"We're making reservoirs that the sugar can trickle into. We don't want it affecting the environment further," Åkerberg told the TT news agency.

He said that the blaze was now under control, with little risk the second storage facility would alight, and that the sugar had posed the biggest problem during the operation.