A lot of beer happens: the beer tsunami in London, which claimed the lives of eight people

Usually, if beer flows like a river, then everyone around is having fun and fervently. But on October 17, 1814, the residents of the London area near St. Giles' Church were not joking. A huge vat of beer with a volume of 610 thousand liters exploded in the warehouse of the local brewery "Mo and Company" (Meux and Company Brewery). The fragments of the vat smashed other barrels, and one and a half million liters of porter splashed out onto the street. What started here…

About five o'clock in the evening on that ill-fated day, one of the tightening hoops fell from the fermentation vat. George Crick, who was on duty at the warehouse, did not attach much importance to this incident and simply left a note to the repairmen. Later, talking to policemen at the ruins of the brewery, he said that such breakdowns happen two or three times a year and nothing tragic has ever happened before.

About an hour later, when Mr. Crick, shirking his duties, was drinking beer in a nearby tavern, there was a deafening explosion and a few quieter ones. Moments later, the brewery building collapsed like a house of cards, and a four-meter-high wave broke free.

At that time, along Tottenham Court Road, there were not fashionable brick houses, as now, but wooden shacks, where mostly poor Irishmen lived. Two houses located opposite the brewery were destroyed by the gushing wave to the ground in a second. The force of the flood was such that one of the victims, a 15-year-old girl named Eleanor Cooper, was literally slammed into the wall of one of the buildings, and the poor thing suffocated.

A total of eight people were killed. Six Irishmen who lived in basements drowned, unable to get out. And one man died of alcohol poisoning. He spent too much time in a beer-flooded room and absorbed so much alcohol through his skin that his heart stopped. 

After the descent of a giant beer wave, the area of the church of St. Giles looked as if it had suffered from an earthquake. Houses without facades and walls, ruins, dirt, firefighters pulling victims out from under the rubble. 

The flood continued to take lives even after it came to naught. The cunning Irishmen decided to somehow improve their catastrophic financial situation and began to exhibit the corpses of the drowned for the amusement of the public. During one of these "rides", the floor in the room collapsed under the weight of onlookers, and they all fell into the basement, which was still filled to the brim with beer. Several more people drowned.