A Sticky Situation: 5 Weirdest Spills Ever, From Pepsi In Russia To An Exploding Sperm Whale

A Russian town is finishing clean-up efforts after 28 million liters of PepsiCo, Inc. PEP juices inundated the streets last Tuesday. Lebedyan’s warehouse, the world’s sixth-largest juice plant, collapsed to release the most flavorful flood in history.

The fruit blend now ranks among the world’s outrageous cascades — an unexpectedly lengthy list.

From the predicted BP plc (ADR) BP oil spill to the various truck leaks of bees, corn dogs, cash and cartridge ink, here are some of the most notable flows.

Slower Than Molasses

The 30-mile-per-hour torrent now termed the “Great Molasses Flood” saturated Boston’s north end Jan. 15, 1919. More than 2.5 million gallons of the sticky sweet, in a wave 25-feet high and 140-feet wide, claimed 21 lives, injured hundreds, brought down infrastructure and amounted to tens of thousands of dollars in damages.

Strangely, this wasn’t the nation’s last molasses disaster. A Hawaiian pipeline feeding a Matson Navigation Company, Inc. ship leaked 230,000 gallons, or 1,400 tons, into the Honolulu Harbor in 2013. The dense syrup sank beneath the water, blanketed the harbor floor and drowned thousands of marine animals.

Tears For Beers

More than a century earlier, multiple vats within England’s Meux and Company Brewery burst to unleash a deluge of nearly 400,000 gallons of beer. Eight people drowned in the London Beer Flood, which collapsed nearby buildings and drenched the drainless streets.

Odd Duck

In 1992, a mighty wave crashed aboard a Chinese container ship, knocked about its containers of rubber bath toys and released 28,800 yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs into their natural Pacific habitat. Through the mid-2000s, surviving creatures washed ashore as far as Maine and Europe.

Red Rum

A decomposing sperm whale was being carted through a Taiwanese city when it erupted — not from its spout, but from its enormous back. A buildup of gas from internal decay forced a rupture near the whale’s tail and soaked the street in blood and organs.

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Image Credit: "Pepsi-Cola refrigerators and food kiosk, Zayeltsovsky Park, Novosibirsk, Russia" By К.Артём.1 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52144431">via Wikimedia Commons