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London Beer Flood of 1814 (wikipedia.org)
91 points by zeristor on Dec 24, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 24 comments



Hard to imagine mourning the death of a 2 year old and a wave of beer kills 5 of your fellow mourners. How do you not lose your mind at that point.


Indeed, the tale took a grim turn with this detail. I had hoped for some good clean macabre irony when I saw “Irish” in a coming sentence.

Luckily, “See Also” has a link to Dublin Whiskey Flood - 13 fatalities - all alcohol poisoning!


Even less fun was the quite horrible Molasses Flood in Boston, 1919. A couple of dozen people died in a spectacularly gruesome way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29679863


"wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 mph (56 km/h), killing 21 and injuring 150"

I didn't know can move that fast. That's faster than Usain Bolt's peak speed.



I enjoyed the Cracked article from way, way back when. (#5 at [1]).

> Eventually the rivets shot out of the tank, unleashing a 15-foot tall tidal wave that covered Boston, providing residents with a valuable look at what a melted Stay-Puft would have really done to New York at the end of Ghostbusters.

[1] https://www.cracked.com/article_141_6-natural-disasters-that...


If you’re going for a tour of the USS Constitution, the site is nearby.


"As the coroner's inquest reached a verdict of an act of God, Meux & Co did not have to pay compensation."

The good ol days, sometimes a lot like these current days...

Yes we're all looking at you Sacklers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family

"The bankruptcy judge acknowledged that the Sacklers had moved money to offshore accounts to protect it from claims, and he said he wished the settlement had been higher."

Wished... Indeed... Only an act of God could have stopped them surely.


That settlement got thrown out the other day. https://www.npr.org/2021/12/16/1065047471/judge-rejects-purd...


This looks promising


> Instead of paying billions of dollars to opioid victims and states, Purdue will stay in limbo and pay hundreds of millions of dollars to lawyers. > [...] > The problem is ... well, one problem is that fairness is sometimes the enemy of pragmatism; letting the Sacklers keep billions and avoid litigation might be the only way to get them to pay billions

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-12-23/the-pu...


That quote sounds like the opinion of someone who wants to be bought off, rather than someone who wants the same kind of accountability that the rest of us are expected to have.


That’s what I heard. They have billions therefore they can pay billions. Purposefully complicating that logic so that they somehow end up keeping more money is an instant red flag.


My late father told me the story of how he was coming home from school in Detroit during prohibition. Agents had just busted a warehouse full of kegs of beer.

As was the practice at the time they'd use an axe to chop into the barrel to empty the contents. He said the entire street was a river full of beer!



13 fatalities, all due to alcohol poisoning rather than the fire. Wow!


Another similar event happened with molasses: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood


Yup the Boston Molassacre


These are mentioned piecemeal in other comments, but this refers to four other similar incidents, all with varying levels of goofy horror:

- Dublin whiskey fire - Great Molasses Flood - Honolulu molasses spill - Pepsi Fruit Juice Flood


Since I posted this originally some time back a few YouTube videos have been made about it, this one being quite good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPoX5nnknUY


If you have ever been to London you will know the vicinity of the incident and appreciate how much the city has changed.

It was at the end of Oxford Street where it meets Tottenham Court Road. Considerable investment in the Thameslink underground station has gone on there recently. There is also the Centrepoint Tower. The streetscape is a world away from having breweries with product left to mature for a year in vast vats. Also having slums. If you had one of those original slum houses in that spot today, you could sell it and never work again.

In this story there is good and bad in terms of how our inner cities have changed. Actual industry in the city centre is quaint but I imagine the air quality - that area is nowadays some of the worst in the UK - was no better.


Diagonally across from there was the old Cross & Blackwell factory, they found jars when prepping for Crossrail.

I’ve tracked my ancestors to living in the Denmark Street Rookery in the 1880s, history becomes more vivid when you have skin in the game.


Is love to see a computer simulation of how this played out.


Reposted as requested from ages, and ages ago.




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