The Great Boston Molasses Flood.

 

On January 15, 1919, The Great Molasses Flood happened in Boston Massachusetts. Tankers filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses burst. A thirty-five mile an hour wave of molasses swept through the town, killing 21 and injuring 150.

How bizarre is that?  

The Great Molasses Flood largely happened in the North End neighborhood at the Purity Distilling Company facility on 529 Commercial Street near Keany Square. The company used the Harborside Commercial Street tank to offload molasses from ships and store it for later transfer by pipeline to the Purity ethanol plant situated on Willow Street in Cambridge.

In this case, the company had stored a molasses tank that stood 50 ft tall and 90 ft in diameter and contained as much as 2.3 million gallons of molasses. The long-range purpose was to ferment the molasses to produce ethanol, the active ingredient in most alcoholic drinks. It was also a  key component in munitions.

On January 15, 1919, the temperatures in Boston had risen above 40 degrees very rapidly from the frigid temperatures that had covered mid-New England for the previous several weeks.

A ship had delivered a fresh load of molasses the day before and that load had warmed been to reduce its thickness for transfer. When that load was mixed with colder molasses already inside the tank, the tank burst. The ground shook, there was a loud roar followed by a long rumble similar to the passing of an elevated train and then a “tremendous crashing, a deep growling” that sounded like a machine gun firing.

The first wave of molasses was at least 25 feet high and moved at about 35 mph down the street. Steel panels from the burst tank rammed into the girders of the adjacent Boston Elevated Railway's Atlantic Avenue structure and a streetcar twisted off its tracks and then back again when the wave hit. Several buildings were swept off their foundations and crushed. The wave was at least 3 to four feet deep. People "were picked up by a rush of air and hurled many feet".  A truck was picked up and hurled into Boston Harbor.

After the initial wave, the molasses became sticky, trapping hundreds of people as they rushed to escape the wave. It sent 150 people to the hospital, killed 21 more, and drowned a large number of horses.

Residents in the neighborhood sued the United States Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA), which had owned Purity Distilling. It was one of the first class-action suits in Massachusetts and is considered a milestone in paving the way for modern corporate regulation. The company paid out $628,000 in damages ($9.37 million in 2022) and relatives of those killed received around $7,000 per victim (equivalent to $104,000 in 2022).

Cleanup crews used saltwater from a fireboat to wash away the molasses and sand to absorb it and as a result, Boston Harbor was brown with molasses until the following summer.