Red Wine Floods A Small Town After Winery Tank Explodes

We’re in the middle of hurricane season, which means we’re used to seeing flooded streets in the news. A small town in Portugal is reporting something similar, but this disaster is entirely man-made.

Levira Distillery, a winemaker in São Lourenço do Bairro, Portugal, accidentally painted the town red after two tanks of wine burst on Sunday. Almost 600,000 gallons of wine flowed through the streets—to put it in context, that’s enough wine to fill an Olympic swimming pool.
The spill rendered the streets unusable to the town’s 2,500 residents. Local authorities quickly sprang into action to divert the wine and prevent it from contaminating the nearby Certima River. Volunteer firefighters successfully drained the liquid and transported it to a wastewater treatment plant.