Council forced to buy super-sized crematorium incinerator to cater for fat corpses - Crematorium.eu News about crematoria in Europe - www.crematorium.eu informs about crematoria in Europe- Krematorium.eu- crematorio.eu, find a crematorium

A council is spending £250,000 on a super-sized incinerator because of a growing number of obese corpses.

Staff at Stafford Borough Council have been forced to turn away dozens of dead bodies for cremation - because they were too fat to fit through the furnace doors.

An increasing number of funeral directors have had to arrange services outside the area because the 'cremators' are not big enough for the massive coffins to fit in.

So now the local authority are installing an incinerator with an extra-wide entrance - at the taxpayers' expense.

The council is also installing two other new cremators as part of a drive to decrease mercury emissions from crematoriums.

Councillors decided that a third one would have be super size to cope with the increase in overweight dead people.

In North Staffordshire, almost one in five children who start school are already obese, compared to a national average of one in 10.

The mean Body Mass Index of adults in the area is 27 - which is classed as overweight.

A health BMI score is between 20 and 25 - and anyone who is measured as 30 or above is obese.

A spokesperson for Stafford Borough Council said: 'The cremators had come to the end of their life and needed replacing.

'However, there have been occasions when we have had to turn down funeral directors because the size of their coffins were too large.

'The larger cremator will be slightly more expensive than the usual-sized one - but the difference in cost is expected to only be marginal.'

Councillor Stan Highfield claimed the equipment - which will cost in excess of £250,000 - was necessary to cope with the growing size of corpses.

He said: 'We need one large cremator because of the national problem with obesity.'