When the combination of unreliable and unsafe beer production, and the proximity of vulnerable people led to tragedy
What happened?
The London Beer Flood was an accident at Meux & Co’s Horse Shoe Brewery, London, on 17 October 1814. It took place when one of the 22-foot-tall (6.7 m) wooden vats of fermenting porter burst. The escaping liquid dislodged the valve of another vessel and destroyed several large barrels – between 128,000 and 323,000 imperial gallons of beer were released in total.
The resulting wave of porter beer destroyed the back wall of the brewery and swept into an area of slum dwellings known as the St Giles rookery. Eight people were killed (aged between 3 and 65 years), five of them mourners at the wake being held by an Irish family for a two-year-old boy. The rookery, which covered an area of eight acres, “was a perpetually decaying slum seemingly always on the verge of social and economic collapse”, and had also been described as “a rendezvous of the scum of society”. The area had been the inspiration for William Hogarth‘s 1751 print Gin Lane.
Stories later arose of hundreds of people collecting the beer, mass drunkenness and a death from alcohol poisoning a few days later.
Legal Outcome
The coroner’s inquest returned a verdict that the eight had lost their lives “casually, accidentally and by misfortune”.
What can we learn from what happened?
The lesson learnt at the time was that the brewing industry gradually stopped using large wooden vats after the accident, but things have moved on a long way since 1814 in the brewing industry. So while there will be little or nothing that can be learned now, it is always worth reflecting on how hazardous working life could be in past times, and how vulnerable certain sections of society were.
Source of Information
Wikipedia