Locals in a Portuguese town woke up on Sunday morning to a torrent of red wine flowing through the town after two enormous storage tanks at a local winery burst.
Update 09/11/23: The UK’s Daily Telegraph now reports the flood was 2.2 million litres (half a million gallons) of wine. Continue to read the original story below:
Tanks at the Destilaria Levira in Levira, Anadia burst on Sunday morning, releasing what must certainly be thousands of gallons of otherwise ready-to-drink red wine into the town. Videos taken by locals showed the scale of the industrial accident, with the alcoholic drink surging past parked cars and down the hill.
The fire brigade responded and redirected the wine to a waste treatment plant, they said, and Portugese publication PT reported the local council confirmed on Sunday evening the wine had been prevented from reaching the local Cértima river, preventing an “environmental disaster”.
The cause of the loss of two tanks of wine is to be investigated. The company responsible, Destilaria Levira, appears to have been proactive in response and turned over its entire workforce to get on cleanup duty. In a social media post, the winery appealed to locals to take images of any damages to their property from the deluge of wine and send it to them, promising to pay for repairs.
Per the company’s own account, the wine was stored in such large vats because of a government programme to support wine makers being impacted by the economic effect of a wine glut in the country. According to a report from earlier this year, there were nearly 58 million litres of surplus wine in Portugal and the government was spending millions of Euros to destroy the overproduction and prevent wineries from going out of business.
While there were, fortunately, no fatalities in the failure of the Levira wine tanks at the weekend, people caught up in other industrial alcohol accidents have not been so lucky in the past.
This event certainly recalls the London Beer Flood of 1814, when up to 300,000 gallons of fermenting beer were released when a 22-foot-tall wooden fat burst under the pressure, knocking out other vats as it did and releasing more beer.
The flood partially demolished the brewery and several other buildings and swept through an area of poor housing, killing eight people in a tidal wave of beer that was reported to reach 15′ high. The brewery, which stood in what is now a prime central London location at Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, had one of the largest beer vats in London at the time.