While the number of new whisky distilleries has increased twentyfold over the past 25 years, remarkably, no distillery deaths have been reported. Progressively stringent health and safety standards, improved training, and better equipment and design have made distilling safer. The only fatalities were human mishaps at warehouses: falling off roofs and forklift accidents. However, the past tells a different story of death and destruction at the distillery.
Since the late 18th century, industrialisation has facilitated large-scale whisky production, with steam-pressure boilers and more complex machinery creating hazardous working conditions within distilleries. This has resulted in thousands of destroyed or damaged distilleries and hundreds of worker accidents and fatalities. Referencing a US insurance industry report from 1881, 97 insured distilleries burned down between 1875 and 1880, with the principal danger being collapsing or exploding doublers jettisoning flammable spirits around the facility. Beyond the human tragedies, there were substantial financial costs from damaged equipment, demolished buildings, razed inventories and lost business time. In some cases, the escaping and burning whisky wreaked havoc on aquatic environments and residential neighbourhoods.
Analysing 300 calamitous whisky and grain distillery disasters over the past two centuries uncovers the primary causes. Fires were the most devastating events, while explosions were the deadliest and often instigated fires. The common causes of explosions were ruptured boilers and stills, flammable ethanol fumes, faulty valves, and static electricity igniting combustible mill dust. A catastrophic explosion occurred at the Corning Distillery in Peoria, Illinois, in June 1904. The world’s second-largest distillery, producing 50,000 proof gallons daily, killed fourteen workers and engulfed 30,000 barrels of whisky into a “seething caldron”.
Fires were commonly caused by omnipresent furnaces and smoke stacks dropping embers, naked flames by candles, oil, and gas lamps for illumination, and later arching electrical circuits sparked ignitions. Lightning was an ever-present threat and frequent cause of warehouse blazes — tinderboxes filled with incendiary liquids in wood containers. A memorable conflagration by a November thunderstorm strike devastated the Heaven Hill Distillery in 1996; the inferno consumed 90,000 barrels and destroyed the site.
Another cause of death was asphyxiation by carbon dioxide poisoning, an invisible and lethal gas that is the by-product of ethyl alcohol conversion during fermentation. In 1856, at the Worcester malt distillery, when one worker succumbed to CO2 suffocation, four colleagues descended into a vat to effect rescue, and all died. Further fatalities included drowning in vats, scalding in cookers, and being mangled in machinery or crushed by vehicular movements. Even inebriated employees posed a risk. At the George Haines Distillery in Kentucky in March 1841, a drunken workman knocked over a stove and set himself and the room ablaze, burning the distillery to the ground in the process.
Occupants in nearby properties faced a greater risk of death, with homes engulfed by the ensuing fires, drowning from ruptured storage and fermentation vats, or expiring from uncontrolled inebriation when liquor ran free.
In June 1917, Russia’s Khmilnyk rye distillery witnessed the greatest tragedy when the Communist government declared an extension of prohibition and ordered the destruction of all existing liquor stocks in the country. This announcement incited soldiers and peasants to riot and pillage the distillery, resulting in a fire where 150 people lost their lives.
Tsar Nicholas II’s 1914 prohibition, often cited as one of the catalysts for the 1917 Russian Revolution, did not save lives. These bans led to rampant illicit production, tainted with toxic methyl alcohol and noxious additives, poisoning tens of thousands until prohibition ended in 1925.
