The Great London Beer Flood Of 1814
Unfortunately for the brewery, and everyone in the area, this time there were consequences--including grave ones. About an hour after the iron ring fell off, all hell broke loose.
First the huge vat burst, which some described as rending such a sound as to be heard five miles away, but that wasn't the end of it. The force of the vat exploding caused others around it to give way as well, unleashing something like 1.3 million gallons (5,850,000 liters) of porter.
Workers indoors were too busy saving fellow employees and trying to contain the porter to worry much about what was happening outside the brewery. An enormous wave of beer, reportedly 15 feet high and weighing hundreds of tons, crashed down the street outside. The beer roared down the street and into cellars, smashed houses, and swept women and children off their feet on the first floors of the surrounding tenement houses. Those living in the cellars had first to climb onto their highest furniture to escape the flood, and then evacuate themselves before the room was totally enveloped.
The manor house of Toten Hall - 1813
An anonymous American who'd been visiting the area wrote this of the ordeal:
All at once, I found myself borne onward with great velocity by a torrent which burst upon me so suddenly as almost to deprive me of breath. A roar as of falling buildings at a distance, and suffocating fumes, were in my ears and nostrils. I was rescued with great difficulty by the people who immediately collected around me, and from whom I learned the nature of the disaster which had befallen me. An immense vat belonging to a brew house situated in Saint Giles, and containing four or five thousand [actually 8,000 ] barrels of strong beer, had suddenly burst and swept every thing before it. Whole dwellings were literally riddled by the flood; numbers were killed; and from among the crowds which filled the narrow passages in every direction came the groans of sufferers.
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