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Comment by bilekas | Hacker News Reader

> None of the fatalities suffered during the fire were due to smoke inhalation, burns, or any other form of direct contact with the fire itself; all of them were attributed to alcohol poisoning.

As an Irish person myself I've always felt the stereotype was a little overblown.. It seems I'm completely wrong. We will literally drink until we die if there is a literal river of whiskey.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

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For what it's worth I don't think an incident like that would have played out any differently if it had occurred in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester or London.

No, a grand total of 13 people out of an entire city population overdosed to death when given access to unlimited alcohol.

I doubt any other city would do better. London sure as hell wouldn't.

I wonder how many alcohol related deaths per day a city the size of London has on a typical day.

In the entire UK, 8,974 deaths attributed directly to alcohol in the whole year of 2020 (18.6% higher than in 2019). Most are not acute "drinking yourself to death" but rather alcohol-related liver disease. Scotland and Northern Ireland fare worse than the other countries.

For London specifically, in 2020 it was ~800 deaths, or about 2.2 per day on average.

Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

They most likely breathed in the vapor.

Whisky from the barrel is considerably stronger than the stuff that’s bottled (which is diluted). Add to that the shorter drinking period too (the urgency of drinking it while the river is still flowing). So I can fully believe people literally drank themselves to death. In fact I’d be surprised if the same fatalities didn’t occur in most cities had they encountered this kind of scenario too.

Sure, that too I suppose.

> During the evacuation many people gathered by the streams of whiskey, filling any vessel at hand with the substance. “Caps, porringers, and other vessels" were all gathered to lap up the burning liquid, resulting in 24 hospitalisations due to alcohol poisoning and 13 subsequent fatalities.

"People drank from the 6 inches (150 mm) deep river of whiskey that is said to have flowed as far as the Coombe"

That's a lot of whisky

Saying a river of whiskey sounds interesting but it was more likely that they drank pure alcohol or it was simply contaminated from the journey through the city.

Yeah that was my thought. They were drinking whiskey and everything else washed into it.

The big rocky candy mountain would be our downfall for sure.

If they didn't drink the whisky it would have burned down more houses those people are true Irish heros.

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