The Backstory: Killer Floods of Alcohol!

Imagine being swept up in a flood of sticky molasses headed to a distillery… or a 25-foot tsunami of beer… or a torrent of hundreds of thousands of gallons of red hot. All true… and deadly stories.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, as you well know, floods caused by Mother Nature
have been plaguing mankind since I don't know rain was invented.
But what about man made floods that don't actually involve water.
Imagine wading through an eighteen inch deep tidal wave of
sticky molasses, or how about trying to escape a tsunami
of hot beer or a torrent of scalding whisky. I'm

(00:23):
Patty Steele. All of these disasters were caused by the
public's love of alcohol, and all of them were deadly.
That's next on the backstory. We're back with the backstory.
So backstory listener Chuck Bell suggested a story about the
Great Boston Molasses Flood of nineteen nineteen, and doing some

(00:47):
research on that led me down a rabbit hole to
the eighteen fourteen beer flood in London and then to
the eighteen oh six whisky flood in Glasgow, Scotland. It
seems like our thirst for a shot of something to
take the edge off can sometimes lead to trouble. We
start off in Boston. It's around twelve thirty in the
afternoon on January fifteenth, nineteen nineteen. It's been a cold winter.

(01:12):
The Purity Distilling Company has an enormous vat of molasses
sitting outside its factory. Why molasses, Well, it turns out
it can be fermented to produce ethanol, the act of
ingredient in all sorts of alcoholic beverages. It's also a
major ingredient in making munitions. The day before the disaster,

(01:32):
a new load of warm molasses had arrived by ship
and was transferred into the tank already holding molasses that
had been super chilled by the cold weather. Did the
temperature variation weaken the tank? Who knows? Witnesses heard a
loud creaking sound. They said they felt the ground shake
and then a roar as it collapsed. There was a

(01:54):
long rumble like a passing train, they said. Others spoke
of a tremendous crashing sound, a deep growling, a thunderclap
like bang, and a sound like a machine gun as
the rivets shot out of the tank. The tank holding
as much as two point three million gallons of this
sticky stuff had burst at its seams. A wave of

(02:16):
molasses rushed through the streets at around thirty five miles
per hour, sweeping people, vehicles, and buildings in its path.
Away The Boston Globe story said molasses waist deep covered
the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage. Human
beings as well as horses were trapped thrashing about in

(02:37):
the sticky mass like flies on sticky flypaper. There was
no escaping, and as the molasses cooled in the freezing air,
it became harder to escape and harder to rescue victims.
In all, twenty one people were killed and about one
hundred and fifty were injured. Where it is during the summer.
For years afterward, the air smelled like sweet molasses. Eventually

(03:02):
the distilling company had to pay what would amount to
millions of dollars in damages. They'd been rushing to make
ethanol for the making of liquor since the amendment making
prohibitional law was ratified the very next day, January sixteenth,
nineteen nineteen, and went into law a year later. Now

(03:22):
going back to another alcohol related flood, there's the Great
London Beer Flood of October seventeenth, eighteen fourteen. The Horseshoe
Brewery had a massive wooden fermentation tank that was held
together with huge iron rings. It held thousands of barrels
of brown ale on that October afternoon, one of the

(03:44):
iron rings around the tank snapped. About an hour later,
the whole tank burst, releasing the hot fermenting beer with
such force that the back wall of the brewery collapsed.
It blasted open several more vats. Now more than three
hundred and twenty thousand gallons of beer began rushing down

(04:05):
nearby streets in a twenty five foot high wave. It
all happened in a London slum area with poorly built houses,
so basements were flooded and several houses collapsed. All this
free beer led to hundreds of people just scooping up
what they could in whatever containers they had on hand.
Some resorted to just drinking it out of the street.

(04:27):
In all, eight people were killed, but there were reports
of the death of a knife from alcohol poisoning. Scores
of people were injured. While there were lawsuits against the brewery,
the courts ruled it had been an act of God.
And finally there was the Lochkatrine Distillery in Glasgow, Scotland.
Early on the morning of November twenty first, nineteen oh six,

(04:49):
one of the distillery's massive vats collapsed. It released around
fifty thousand gallons of red hot whiskey. Now the vat
was situated on the top floor of the b building,
so two more giant vats were also carried away. So
now one hundred and fifty thousand gallons of whisky flooded
into the basement where draft, which is the refuse from

(05:11):
the malt used to make the whisky, was stored. As
the whisky mixed with the draft, it turned into a
sort of liquid glue before flooding out onto the street,
trapping people and animals that were nearby. Amazingly, while a
number of people were injured, there was only one death,
a man had drowned in the whisky tsunami. What's interesting

(05:32):
in all these cases is that each changed the laws
surrounding alcohol production facilities. The Boston molasses flood paved the
way for modern corporate regulations. The London Brewery stopped using
wooden fermentation vats, and in Glasgow the La Katrine Distillery
simply shut down the year after their flood. Again, I

(05:54):
want to thank backstory listener Chuck Bell for suggesting this story.
I hope you are enjoying the backstory with Steele. Please
leave a review and follow or subscribe for free to
get new episodes delivered automatically and like Chuck did, Please
feel free to DM me if you have a story
you'd like me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty Steele
and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele. The

(06:23):
Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Durand Group,
and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our
writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
Feel free to reach out to me with comments and
even story suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty Steele and
on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the

(06:45):
Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history you didn't
know you needed to know.