Residents in a Portuguese village woke up to an almost biblical scene on Sunday morning. The streets were impassable, replaced by a raging river of close to 600,000 gallons of red wine.

After two wine tanks belonging to a local distillery burst, enough booze flowed down the roads of São Lourenço do Bairro to fill an Olympic-size pool — and to spark fears from local leaders about possible environmental damage.

Though wine flooded the streets of the town of some 2,200 people for most of the day, firefighters were able to divert the liquid before it gushed into the nearby Cértima River, which feeds into Portugal’s largest freshwater lake and supports a network of wetland habitats, reed beds and marshlands. No one was injured in the burgundy deluge, but municipal leaders told the local outlet JN that they are still evaluating possible damage to buildings or structures.

Sunday’s wine wave began at Destilaria Levira, a company that specializes in transforming wine into a slew of products, including gin, cleaning supplies and food oils. Though authorities are still investigating what caused the tanks to burst, the company said the wine they carried was essentially going to be destroyed — or distilled into raw alcohol — as part of the Portuguese government’s attempts to address a brewing wine crisis.

The nation with the world’s highest wine consumption per capita is among the European countries grappling with a massive surplus of wine this year. The combination of rising production costs and an ever-increasing rang