Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 10, 2014

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REAL LIFE NEWS: THE GREAT LONDON BEER FLOOD

by Hazed

I’ve just discovered that there was a great beer flood in London in 1814. If I’d known about this when I was writing locations for our aborted game about Victorian-era explorers, Age of Adventure, I would have included it in my scenarios!

At least eight people died when a seven-metre-tall vat of beer burst after an iron hoop holding it together gave way. It was housed in the Horse Shoe brewery, sited at the crossroads of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street right in the heart of central London (on the site of the current Dominion Theatre).

When the huge tank burst, it upended another tank, and 2.5 million pints of beer flooded out of the building. The beery wave smashed through one of the brewery walls then spilled into the surrounding streets, which at the time were slums. Houses were destroyed and basements filled with booze. People in the nearby roads were swept away by the flood.

An investigation didn’t fault the brewery, but put the accident down to misfortune. The Meux company which owned the brewery lost a great deal of money when the beer when down the drain – it was estimated to be worth £23,000. On the plus side, they were able to claimed back the excise duty which they had already paid on the lost beer.

This whole episode reminds me of a food flood which I did use in Age of Adventure: the great Boston molasses flood. Although this was a little out of the time period the game covered – it happened just after the first world war – I used artistic license to timeshift it so I could include it when I designed the map of the city. The extra link below gives a lot more detail about the molasses flood, and the legal case that followed.

Source: http://londonist.com/2014/07/londons-forgotten-disasters-the-great-beer-flood.php
See also: http://www.historytoday.com/chuck-lyons/sticky-tragedy-boston-molasses-disaster

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