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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 14, 2016

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REAL LIFE NEWS: THE FRENCH WINE FLOOD

by Hazed

The streets of a small French town ran red last week, after a flood of wine drenched the town.

Five huge vats of wine were spilled in Sete, near Montpellier, in southern France. The booze flooded local basements, car parks, and homes, as around 50,000 litres of plonk were spilled.

The vats were the property of the Biron distributors. The spillage wasn’t an accident – it was a deliberate act by the radical group of wine producers CRAV (Comité régional d'action viticole).

Yes, radical wine producers. Only in France!

The group is angry about cheap foreign wine being imported into the country to be sold in stores and supermarkets, and this is their way of protesting.

This reminds me of two incidents that I found out about when doing research for our old game Age of Adventure: the London beer flood, and the Boston molasses flood.

The London beer flood of 1814 saw a tidal wave of beer at least 15 feet high flood out of a broken vat from the Horse Shoe Brewery in Tottenham Court Road. Eight people were killed and homes were demolished.

One hundred years later, a giant tank of molasses in Boston ruptured and flooded the streets, causing devastation as a 15 foot high, 160 foot wide tidal wave rushed through the city at 35 mph. 21 people were killed and 150 injured, numerous horses died, and property destroyed. Rivets popping from the tank peppered the neighbourhood like machine gun bullets.

At least nobody was killed in the French wine flood!

Source: http://www.thelocal.fr/20160803/french-town-floods-with-wine-after-act-of-sabotage
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/what-really-happened-in-the-london-beer-flood-200-years-ago-9796096.html
http://www.historytoday.com/chuck-lyons/sticky-tragedy-boston-molasses-disaster

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