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The Kentucky Meat Shower? The Great Molasses Flood? What is going on in the world?? On today's episode of The List Show, we're covering some of the strangest disasters from history. Golfballs raining from the sky, fruit juice flooding the streets... who knew the apocalypse would be so... silly? Don't miss a video! Subscribe NOW: https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss?sub_confirmation=1 About Mental Floss: Mental Floss is where curious people come for trivia-tastic information. Mental Floss produces lists of fun facts, debunks common misconceptions, and tells untold stories from history, science, culture and more. Website: http://www.mentalfloss.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mental_floss Facebook: https://facebook.com/mentalflossmagazine Discord: https://discord.io/mentalfloss Copyright Notice: This video and YouTube channel contain dialog, music, and images that are property of Mental Floss. You are authorized to share the video link and channel, and embed this video in your website or others as long as a link back to this YouTube Channel is provided. 2025 Mental Floss 8 Weirdest Disasters From History | Mental Floss https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss
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0:00
When you think of a disaster, things like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes
0:05
probably come to mind. But some catastrophes aren't quite that run-of-the-mill. I'm Erin
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McCarthy, and today on The List Show, we're going to explore a downpour of mystery meat
0:14
toxic smog, and a sticky situation for Pepsi. But let's tee off with the time the Florida
0:20
weather forecast was partly cloudy with a chance of golf balls. On September 1, 1969
0:25
residents of Punta Gorda were stunned when, in the words of one newspaper
0:30
dozens and dozens and dozens of dimpled white balls rained upon the city during an otherwise
0:35
commonplace rainstorm. The golf balls clogged gutters and cluttered lawns and didn't appear
0:40
to do much harm otherwise. Although the incident was bizarre at first glance, there was likely a
0:45
perfectly reasonable explanation. Severe weather in Punta Gorda tends to cause water spouts
0:50
Water spouts are capable of sucking up entire bodies of water, so the golf balls likely came
0:55
from a pond on a golf course, where many an unlucky golfer had lost a ball. The water spouts sucked
1:00
up the pond, then released it on unsuspecting citizens shortly thereafter. Now that's what I
1:04
call a real water hazard. I'll see myself out while the intro rolls
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A normal flood is disastrous enough, but mix in some sugar cane and you've got the Boston
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molasses flood of 1919, 2.3 million gallons of what has been called sweet, sticky death
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The catastrophe occurred when a faulty tank finally burst, unleashing a wave said to be
1:32
up to 40 feet tall and 160 feet wide that traveled 35 miles per hour. Several buildings
1:37
were totally leveled, 150 people were injured, and 21 people were killed. Most deaths were due
1:43
to suffocation by syrup, but other fatalities occurred when victims were struck by debris
1:48
traveling in the molasses wave were collapsed buildings. As the molasses hardened in the
1:53
streets, rescue efforts became increasingly difficult. U.S. Industrial Alcohol, the company that owned the tank, knew it was problematic for years. Workers reported hearing groaning
2:02
and creaking noises every time the tank was filled, and it leaked so much that neighborhood
2:07
kids would sneak tastes of the stuff oozing out of the sides. Despite the widely known issues
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USIAC later tried to claim that the exploding tank was the result of a terrorist attack
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an anarchist dropping a pipe bomb into the top of the container. The court didn't buy that argument, and in a move that was unprecedented at the time
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USIAC was held accountable for the deaths and injuries caused by their negligence
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It set a much-needed new bar for construction standards in the U.S.
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one small silver lining to come out of the disaster. Cleanup took weeks, and citizens of Boston would claim that they could smell molasses in the air
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or in basements for decades after, even as late as the 1960s
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We not done with food and beverage floods just yet More than a century before Boston disastrous deluge London had a terrible tsunami of its own On October 17 1814 a huge vat of porter at the Horseshoe Brewery broke
3:01
sending an estimated 3,500 barrels worth of beer, or about one million pints
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into the surrounding streets. Historians don't quite agree on how much beer it was exactly
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but it was definitely a lot. Back then, it was fairly common for breweries to keep vast
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quantities of suds on hand, in no small part just for the pure spectacle of the giant vat
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Shortly before the flood, a worker noted that one of the 700-pound iron bands holding the cask
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together had slipped off. He informed his boss, who said that no harm whatever would ensue from
3:30
the broken piece. An hour later, the vat broke and the beer busted through the back wall of the
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brewery. The collapsing bricks instantly killed a teenage girl who had been washing pots in the
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alley. Others drowned when the beer flooded basement dwellings, and some were killed when
3:44
a nearby house collapsed. Overall, eight people died, mostly women and children. In a stark contrast
3:50
to the Boston molasses incident, the brewery was not only found free from all responsibility
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Parliament also granted them a special tax waiver to make up for the duties paid on the lost beer
4:01
But the families of those who perished and the people who had homes destroyed got nothing
4:05
The Great Smog of 1952 sounds like a dystopian movie plot. A toxic cloud descends upon a city, wreaks havoc for five days, and smothers thousands
4:14
of people to death. But this was not a tale of fiction, as some of you may recall from season one of The Crown
4:20
London had long been known for its heavy pea supers, thick fogs caused by a mix of weather
4:25
emissions from industrial companies, and coal burning from home hearths. But on December 5th, 1952, a perfect storm converged to create a deadly smog that killed
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3,000 in a week, and ultimately an estimated 12,000 over time. That week, a weather phenomenon
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known as an anticyclone hit London, causing a blanket of warm air to be suspended over the city
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The conditions themselves were good for the formation of fog, but the anticyclone created
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something called a temperature inversion. So instead of dispersing the city's toxic emissions
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into the air, the temperature inversion trapped all of them, including sulfur dioxide, the gas
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created from burning coal. Sulfur dioxide combined with the water particles in the fog
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essentially creating acid rain that assaulted the city for the better part of a week
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It was later calculated that every day of the fog brought 1,000 tons of smoke particles
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2,000 tons of carbon dioxide, 140 tons of hydrochloric acid, and 14 tons of fluoride
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compounds, all in addition to the 800 tons of sulfuric acid. Most of the deaths were the result
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of respiratory failure, but some were also attributed to a number of transportation accidents
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The smog was so dense in some places that people couldn't see their own feet
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If any silver lining can be taken from this awful event in history, it's that the British
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government passed the Clean Air Act of 1956 a few years later in direct response to the Great Smog The act allowed for the establishment of smoke areas in the city and brought in new restrictions on furnaces Eventually the air of London would clean up
5:53
and there hasn't been a great pea-souper since 1962. On March 3rd, 1876, Mrs. Crouch of Bath
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County, Kentucky was outside making soap on a perfectly clear day when it began to rain
6:05
That's already odd when it was a completely cloudless sky, but odder still when you consider
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that the rain wasn't water, but a light drizzle of meat. According to Mrs. Crouch, the chunks were
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a grisly, gory substance that fell like large snowflakes. When the shower was over, chunks of
6:19
meat lay scattered across the yard and stuck to the Crouch's fence. Two brave men tasted the mystery
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meat and declared that it was venison or mutton, but no one was able to offer an explanation of
6:29
where it came from or how it had arrived. Pieces were taken for testing, and a month later
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one scientist felt he had come up with a plausible explanation. The meat was Nostoc
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also known as star jelly, a cyanobacteria known to occur when it rains. Except it hadn't rained
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Back to square one. Testing by other scientists revealed that the flesh came from the lungs of
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an infant, or maybe a horse. Someone else thought perhaps a passing balloonist had let lunch fall
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out of the basket. And finally, Dr. L.D. Kastenbein came up with the theory that most
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modern-day scientists subscribe to today. The meat was vulture vomit. The black vulture and
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turkey vulture are common to Kentucky, and both are able to projectile vomit the contents of their
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stomachs to make themselves lighter, or as a defense mechanism. Kurt Goad, a professor at
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Kentucky's Transylvania University, has since completed additional research that adds credence to Kastenbein's theory. Black vultures specifically have been known to fly in flocks of dozens or even
7:24
hundreds, and they can fly at altitudes up to 20,000 feet, meaning that Mrs. Crouch wouldn't
7:29
have seen a large flock of giant birds before they regurgitated lunch all over her property
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The vulture vomit theory would also explain why scientists testing bits of meat ended up with
7:38
different results, since the vultures would have eaten different meals. Case closed? We'll never
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truly know for sure, but it seems more likely than a clumsy balloonist. Unfortunately for those brave
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taste testers. On September 1st, 1859, amateur astronomer Richard Carrington was watching the
7:55
sun at the observatory attached to his home in Red Hill, England. As one does. To his astonishment
8:00
while he watched, two bright spots flared up intensely from a group of sunspots. They were
8:05
gone within five minutes. But soon after, things on Earth started to go haywire. Telegraph systems
8:11
shocked their operators and burned papers. In fact, the air was so electrically charged
8:16
the telegraphed operators discovered they could work their systems without batteries at all
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Auroras flared so brightly in the middle of the night that birds began chirping and people could
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read newspapers. It was later determined that the bright flashes Carrington had observed
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were actually solar flares with the energy of 10 billion 1 megaton atomic bombs. Things were
8:36
somewhat back to normal by the afternoon of September 2nd but we wouldn be so lucky if such an event happened today A modern Carrington event could mean an internet apocalypse as Space explained which is why many governments call space weather one of the most serious natural risks that Earth
8:50
faces. GPS could go down, disrupting cars, planes, and cell phones. Satellite communications would
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likely be severely impacted, bringing things like credit card transactions to a grinding halt
9:03
And transformers across the world would probably blow, damaging and even destroying power grids
9:09
And by some estimates, the social and economic disruptions caused by a solar flare of this
9:13
magnitude would cost up to $2.6 trillion in damages in the US alone
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Lucky for us, flares like this tend to happen once every 500 years, so hopefully we're safe
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for a while. In late July of 1184, Henry VI, the king of Germany, was holding court in the city of
9:29
Erfurt to help settle a long-lasting feud between Ludwig III of Thuringia and Archbishop Conrad of
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Mainz. Many people showed up to watch the mediation process, including a number of noblemen from
9:40
across the region. Events had just gotten underway when the wooden floor, under immense strain from
9:45
the number of people packed into the proceedings, suddenly collapsed. This would have been awful on
9:50
its own, but things were about to get much, much worse. Beneath the floor was apparently an immense
9:55
latrine built to serve the large order of monks. Its sheer size was meant to ensure that it didn't
10:00
have to be emptied often. A benefit to the monks, but not the poor people who found themselves
10:05
swimming in it when the floor gave way. It's believed that at least 60 people died
10:11
some from the fall itself, and some from drowning in excrement. King Henry and Archbishop Conrad
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made it out alive. They had been sitting in a stone alcove and grabbed window rails to prevent
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themselves from falling. Despite dropping into the depths, Ludwig III managed to survive as well
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I have to say, of all the ways to die, this one is definitely one of the crappiest
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Too soon? Okay, one final beverage disaster to close out the show, and a fairly recent one at
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that. On April 25th, 2017, the roof of a warehouse in Lebyogen, Russia collapsed, damaging giant vats
10:46
inside. The warehouse happened to belong to Pepsi, but the destroyed vats didn't contain cola
10:52
Instead, 28 million liters of juice—cherry, pineapple, tangerine, orange, pomegranate, and more—spilled
10:58
out into the city, leaving the streets sticky and smelling bizarrely tropical. Two people were
11:03
injured, but unlike the devastating beer and molasses floods, there were no fatalities
11:07
The biggest concern came from the fact that much of the juice flowed into the nearby Don River
11:12
bringing worries of contamination, pollution, and harm to local aquatic life. Thankfully
11:16
studies conducted a week later showed that no lasting damage had been done
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