Mega ice pop is beat by the heat

from the NY Daily News via Making Light:

Workers are powerless as a sea of Kiwi-Strawberry Snapple from giant popsicle swamps Union Square yesterday. A 25-foot, 17-ton ice pop made of the supposed "best stuff on Earth" melted in the New York sun yesterday - turning Union Square into a river of Kiwi-Strawberry Snapple. Bicyclists wiped out in the stream of goo. Pedestrians slipped. Traffic was, well, frozen. Snapple officials had hoped to get in the Guinness Book of World Records and promote their new line of ice treats. Instead, New Yorkers got a first-of-its-kind, first-day-of-summer mess. "It was a big boo-boo," said Kizzy Vazquez, 28, of Manhattan, as she watched the mammoth pink pop ooze while someone with a sick sense of humor blasted "Cruel Summer" over a sound system. "They should have had that [up] before the sun came out." Firefighters hosed down E. 17th St. between Union Square East and West, and about 100 yards of Park Ave. South, rinsing away a thick, sweet slime. "No one was attempting to lick it up - but that really isn't our concern because it isn't a health hazard," quipped Capt. Michael McLaughlin of Ladder 3. Snapple's attempt was a matter of icing a record held by a 21-foot-long, 7-foot-5-wide, 20,000-pound pop in Holland. The New York contender weighed 34,500 pounds and came in at 25 feet long and 5 feet wide, Snapple said. But the behemoth didn't make the record book because it couldn't stand on its own in temperatures that climbed to over 80 degrees at midday. "It's a tough break," said Stuart Claxton of the Guinness Book of World Records on the sticky scene. "What was unsettling was that the fluid just kept coming. It was quite a lot of fluid. On a hot day like this, you have to move fast." A Snapple rep apologized for the meltdown. Pressed yesterday by the Daily News, company officials said they would offer to help pay for the cleanup. Kelly Luaders of Art Below Zero, which helped with the project, tried to stay cool. "At least it smelled good," she said. The remains of the pop were loaded into a freezer truck to be carted back to Edison, N.J., which apparently is where monster frozen treats go to die.