For a meteorologist to write an article about a great flood of the past with human casualties seems perfectly normal to you, but to inform you that this flood was not due to rain but to beer (!) , looks like a lie and seems almost absurd.
However, the London beer flood was a real incident, which occurred on October 17, 1814 in the St Giles area of the English capital during which 8 at least people lost their lives.
At the local brewery on Tottenham Court Road, there was installed a huge tank, which contained over 610,000 liters of beer, and at one point the tank burst from the pressure of its contents. The collapse of this caused the collapse of similar tanks next to it in the same building. Thus, a total of 1,470,000 liters of beer was released and spilled into the streets. The wave of beer destroyed 2 houses, as well as demolished the wall of a nearby pub. Within minutes, the nearby streets were awash with alcohol, killing a mother and daughter who were having tea in their path, and a wave of beer seeped into the buildings.
The brewery was among the old houses of the St Giles quarter, and in the area lived many destitute families who lived in cellars, which after the incident were filled with beer. At least 8 people drowned or died from injuries during the incident, including 2 toddlers aged three and four. In the following days, many cases of alcohol poisoning were reported in hospitals because everyone went and collected it from the streets.
The brewery was sued and the case ended up in court, but the judge and jury decided that the disaster was inevitable (a random event) and no specific person was responsible. The company that managed the brewery ran into financial difficulties due to the rebuilding of the tanks and also due to the taxes it had already paid on the spilled beer. However, they claimed the refund of the tax by petitioning the English Parliament, and managed to get it refunded to them successfully. The damages were in the order of 23,000 pounds (1.25 million today!)
The brewery was demolished about a century later in 1922, and today in its place is the Dominion Theatre, in central London at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street.