'Odour' from AnalTech ramming leads to hazmat team callout

An American company implausibly named AnalTech – no, really – has been slammed hard enough for a hazardous materials response team to be called out to deal with the smell.

A pick-up truck ploughed through the wall of AnalTech, which insists it is an analytical technology firm, early on Tuesday morning, as reported by Delaware TV news station WDEL.

The truck crashed into an external wall, knocking a hole through it into the laboratory inside.

"Officials entering the building detected an odour," the station said, "and a representative explained the smell was coming from a lab."

Alarmed officials called in hazardous materials (hazmat) teams. They gave the all-clear after "about three hours", though investigations are said to be ongoing. Two people hurt in the crash were taken to a local hospital with what was described as "non life threatening injuries".

The New York Daily News reports not only that AnalTech is a maker of chromatography plates but that its history stretches back to the 1960s. The company allegedly accepted a suggestion by a local marketing firm to name itself AnalTech back then, but, as the NYDT quotes from the Houston Chronicle, AnalTech has since "faced certain challenges because of the juvenile humour that has developed in the past few decades".

We couldn't believe it until we looked up the AnalTech website (try Googling that at work without getting sacked) and found that its company blog really is as stupendously dull and long-lived as you'd expect from a genuine firm.

Incidentally, they now seem to be trading under the name iChromatography – and who could blame them? ®