5 of History’s Most Delicious Natural Disasters
There’s usually nothing appetizing about fires and floods, just a lot of destruction and a smell that never quite goes away. Sometimes, however, the source of the damage is tasty enough to almost make you wanna stick around, though we’d advise against it. Streets flowing with chocolate and beer sound great until you hear about…
The Great Molasses Flood
In 1919, a shoddy molasses tank in Boston burst, unleashing a 15-foot wave of 2.3 million gallons of syrup into the streets. It might sound like wacky Sharknado-esque satire, but 2.3 million gallons of anything is no joke, resulting in 21 deaths, 150 injuries and a good half-mile of the city leveled and sticky. Even months later, they were still recovering victims. You know how it takes forever to wash that stuff out.
The Rockwood & Company Chocolate Fire
Earlier that year, a fire broke out at the Rockwood & Company chocolate factory in Brooklyn, and as firefighters hosed down the building, they also washed a torrent of chocolate lava out onto the streets. Fortunately, no one was harmed by the chocolate river — in fact, it gave a lot of children what was almost certainly the best day of their lives.
The Wisconsin Butter Flood
In 1991, a Wisconsin storage facility housing 10 to 15 million pounds of butter caught fire, resulting in “a massive wave of melted butter.” This, too, was harmless, unless you count the firefighters who got “butter in places a guy shouldn’t have butter,” but the river flowed for eight days until it could be diverted to stormwater discharge ponds. It turned out the warehouse was storing so much butter because the government had bought an excess in an attempt to control prices, and we might take a lesson from that if we weren’t so distracted by thoughts of swimming lazily through warm butter.
The London Beer Flood
In 1814, a 22-foot vat of porter at the Horse Shoe Brewery burst, sending hundreds of thousands of gallons of beer crashing through its back wall and into the nearby neighborhoods. In addition to the brewery, two houses were destroyed, and eight people were killed, most of them members of an Irish funeral party. We swear that’s not an Irish joke.
The Dublin Whiskey Fire
It gets hard not to make them, however, when discussing the Dublin whiskey fire of 1875. A storehouse containing 5,000 barrels of whiskey caught fire, and soon, the barrels began exploding, sending a river of whiskey six inches deep snaking its way through the city. Interestingly, thanks to the loudly alarmed nearby livestock, just about everyone who wanted to managed to evacuate in time — but not everyone wanted to. They sloshed into the streets, filling up buckets or straight-up sticking their faces into the stream and slurping up that literal firewater. As a result, all 13 of the people who perished died from alcohol poisoning, probably extremely happy.
