Distillery Disasters: The Dublin Whiskey Fire of 1875, Warehouse Collapses and Safety Lessons

The Dublin whiskey fire of 1875 is remembered for burning spirit flowing through the streets, but its reported deaths came from alcohol poisoning, not flames or smoke.[1] Later warehouse disasters in Glasgow and Kentucky show how the consequences can extend beyond a building: collapsing walls, displaced families and polluted rivers all belong to this history.[1][3][9]

Beginning with the Dublin fire of 1875

At 8pm on Friday 18 June 1875, the alarm was raised in the Newmarket area of Dublin’s Liberties. The fire involved Malone’s malt house and a bonded storehouse on Chamber Street, where whiskey and other spirits were stored.[1]

Hundreds of police, soldiers and firefighters arrived within 15 minutes, led by Captain James Robert Ingram, Dublin Fire Brigade’s first chief.[1] The brigade was only 13 years old, and Ingram had learned firefighting in New York.[2]

Burning whiskey flowed down one side of Mill Street. The Liberties Dublin’s account describes a stream about 0.6 metres wide and 15 centimetres deep, extending more than 400 metres.[1] Ingram stopped people throwing water onto the burning spirit because it would spread the blaze, and ordered horse manure dumped to block its flow.[2]

This was a neighbourhood disaster, not simply a warehouse loss. Tenements on Mill Street, Ardee Street, Chamber Street and Cork Street were destroyed, leaving many families displaced.[1]

Story card: Beginning with the Dublin fire of 1875

Claim: Crowds collected whiskey in hats and boots during the Dublin fire.
Verdict: Documented
What the record shows: The Irish Independent quotes contemporary reporting that people “took off their hats and boots to collect the whiskey”.[2]
Evidence against or gap: The supplied record does not identify the original report’s publication date.
Earliest known source: Contemporary reporting quoted in the Irish Independent account. The original publication and its date are not established in the supplied record.
Last checked: November 2026. The exact day requires verification before publication.

The Liberties Dublin gives the death toll as 13 and says all died of alcohol poisoning, not flames or smoke.[1] A contemporary report quoted by the Irish Independent said four people had died in hospital and two boys were dying.[2] The accounts differ in their reporting of deaths, and the total remains disputed. It names William Smith, a 21-year-old labourer admitted to Richmond Hospital in a “profound coma”, among those who died.[1]

That distinction matters. The crowds collecting spirit are part of a documented fatal event, not a comic drinking story.

Glasgow: when the warehouse walls fell

On the evening of 28 March 1960, fire broke out at a whisky bond on Cheapside Street, Glasgow. An explosion brought down the building’s approximately 18-metre walls, killing 14 members of Glasgow Fire Service and five members of Glasgow Salvage Corps.[3]

The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service describes Cheapside Street as Britain’s largest peacetime loss of life for fire and rescue services.[3] Almost 4.5 million litres of whisky and more than 140,000 litres of rum fuelled the fire, which crews fought for 11 hours.[4]

Survivor James Dunlop recalled: “It was a very sudden and unexpected explosion that took us by surprise.”[4] His account puts the speed of the collapse beside the much longer firefighting operation.

Glasgow suffered another fatal fire on 18 November 1968, when 22 people died at a former whisky bond on James Watt Street. Bars on the windows blocked escape.[4] The word former matters: this was not another account of a burning stock of maturing whisky, and the two incidents should not be merged.

Heaven Hill: destruction and recovery in 1996

On 7 November 1996, fire destroyed Heaven Hill’s distillery and seven timber rickhouses, or barrel warehouses, in Bardstown, Kentucky. Each warehouse was seven storeys high and approximately 61 metres long.[10]

The Courier Journal’s retrospective reports that the fire destroyed 14% of Heaven Hill’s maturing bourbon, representing 2% of the world’s bourbon. None of the company’s employees was hurt.[10] Authorities never determined what started the fire, so lightning should not be presented as its established cause.[10]

Recovery involved help from competitors, which lent Heaven Hill distilling space. The company subsequently bought the Bernheim Distillery in Louisville in 1999.[10] One smaller continuity survived the destruction: manager Charlie Downs found a refrigerator in the ruins containing the company’s yeast strain.[10]

Those details distinguish the immediate physical loss from the longer task of keeping production going. The wider business context belongs in the global whisky industry, rather than in an assumption that destruction of a distillery necessarily ends its business.

Barton 1792 warehouse collapse in 2018

At Barton 1792 Distillery in Bardstown, part of a barrel warehouse collapsed on 22 June 2018, involving roughly 9,000 barrels. A caller to the emergency services described it simply: “Just out of the blue. Just fell.”[5]

The remaining section fell on 4 July, involving another 9,000 barrels.[6] The warehouse, one of 29 at the distillery, could hold up to 20,000 barrels.[5] Nobody was injured in either collapse.[5]

Yet the absence of injuries did not mean the damage stayed inside the warehouse. Alcohol reached a nearby stream and pond, killing about 800 fish. Kentucky’s Energy and Environment Cabinet said it would issue a citation and potential fine.[5]

Barton therefore belongs in this history even though it was a collapse rather than a warehouse fire. Its recorded consequences connect structural failure with the same environmental concern that would become central to the Jim Beam fire the following year.

Jim Beam warehouse fire and the Kentucky River in 2019

A Jim Beam warehouse in Woodford County, Kentucky, caught fire on 2 July 2019. Kentucky’s Energy and Environment Cabinet attributed the ignition to lightning.[8] The warehouse held about 45,000 barrels of maturing bourbon, approximately 1% of Beam’s bourbon inventory.[7]

Officials allowed the fire to burn to reduce the amount of contaminated runoff reaching a drinking-water tributary, while reinforcing containment berms with sand.[7] Emergency director Drew Chandler explained the decision: “The longer it burns, the more of the distilled spirits burn with it.”[7]

This was a response to that particular emergency, not general advice for tackling a spirit fire. Alcohol nevertheless flowed from Glenns Creek into the Kentucky River and then the Ohio River.[8]

The alcohol plume reached nearly 37 kilometres, and dead fish were found along approximately 100 kilometres of Glenns Creek and the Kentucky River.[9] In an order dated 6 December 2019, Jim Beam agreed to a fine and payments that included costs to supplement the local fish population.[9]

The river damage makes the boundary of the warehouse an inadequate boundary for understanding the disaster. The stock burned in one location, but the recorded consequences travelled downstream.

Safety lessons: the spill matters as well as the fire

The Health and Safety Executive identifies fires and explosions as the principal hazards of distilled spirit storage. Its whisky warehouse assessment guide also addresses contaminated firefighting water entering watercourses.[12] These are connected problems: a response must account for the spirit, the structure and where escaping liquid could go.

Scottish Government guidance published in February 2015 identifies measures including reduced ethanol vapour release, ventilation, suitable lighting and switches, no smoking, explosion relief and, in some circumstances, automatic fire suppression.[11] These are measures described by that guidance, not a checklist for readers to design or operate a warehouse.

For whisky maturation warehouses in Scotland, the HSE safety report assessment guide says pools of escaped spirit extending up to 50 metres in radius should not be discounted without justification at typical sites.[12] It also advises assessors to assume nearby plant receives no water spray protection for 20 minutes after a major fire starts.[12]

Both points challenge a reassuringly small picture of an incident. Safety assessment has to consider a spreading spill and a period before protective measures take effect, rather than assuming immediate containment.

Common mistakes in retelling these disasters

Treating water as a universal answer: Dublin’s account records Ingram stopping its use on flowing, burning spirit because it would spread the blaze.[2] That historical decision is not a substitute for professional emergency response.

Giving every warehouse fire the same cause: Kentucky officials attributed the 2019 Beam fire to lightning; the cause of Heaven Hill’s 1996 fire was never determined.[8][10] A known explanation for one event cannot fill the gap in another.

Counting only lost barrels: Dublin’s displaced families, Glasgow’s dead responders and Kentucky’s damaged waterways show why stock losses alone cannot describe these disasters.[1][3][9]

Where to go next

• Who Makes the World's Whisky? The Global Industry Explained: the wider industry behind distilleries and warehouses.
• How a New Distillery Gets Started: From Licence to First Cask: the stages involved in establishing production.
• Silent Seasons, Production Pauses and Mothballing Explained: distinctions between different kinds of production interruption.

Sources

1. The Liberties Dublin. The Great Whiskey Fire of 1875. Publication date not supplied. https://libertiesdublin.ie/the-great-whiskey-fire-of-1875/
2. Irish Independent. 1875: when the streets of the Liberties ran with piping hot whiskey. Publication date not supplied. https://www.independent.ie/life/1875-when-the-streets-of-the-liberties-ran-with-piping-hot-whiskey/35034342.html
3. Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. Remembering the Cheapside Street fire 65 years on. 28 March 2025. https://www.firescotland.gov.uk/news/remembering-the-cheapside-street-fire-65-years-on/
4. BBC News. How Glasgow earned its reputation as the 'Tinderbox City'. Publication date not supplied. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-44506780
5. Courier Journal. 911 caller recalls 'out of the blue' Barton 1792 warehouse collapse. 27 July 2018. https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/2018/07/27/barton-1792-distillery-collapse-listen-911-call-audio/848011002/
6. CNN. The other half of that bourbon warehouse collapsed. 5 July 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/05/us/bourbon-warehouse-collapse
7. Associated Press. Fire destroys Jim Beam warehouse, bourbon flows into river. 3 July 2019. https://apnews.com/article/a5f382c5eff7430eb3f6fdc7b47bce6a
8. Associated Press. Official: Lightning caused Jim Beam bourbon warehouse fire. 10 July 2019. https://apnews.com/general-news-201ba3afdbcb4fbcba80ca861fb45f7d
9. Boston Herald, Associated Press. Jim Beam fined in massive bourbon spill that killed fish. 28 December 2019. https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/12/28/jim-beam-fined-in-massive-bourbon-spill-that-killed-fish/
10. Courier Journal. A massive fire nearly shuttered Heaven Hill Distillery 30 years ago. 5 November 2026. https://www.courier-journal.com/story/life/food/spirits/bourbon/2026/11/05/how-heaven-hill-distillery-recovered-from-massive-1996-fire-smoke-whiskey-facility/92382744007/
11. Scottish Government, Building Standards Division. Whisky Maturation Warehouses: Storage Buildings (Class 1): Automatic Fire Suppression Systems. February 2015.
12. Health and Safety Executive. Safety Report Assessment Guide: Whisky maturation warehouses. PM/Technical/10, edition date not supplied. https://www.hse.gov.uk/Comah/assets/docs/whisky-maturation.pdf

This desk-researched article uses the site’s verified fact sheet, distinguishing historical reporting, official incident accounts and safety guidance.

Last checked: November 2026