This week’s entry: Great Boston Molasses Flood
What it’s about: An Onion article come to life, as the North End of Boston was engulfed by molasses on a fateful January day in 1919 when a 12,000-ton tank filled with the liquid burst, sending a tidal wave of sweet, sticky disaster through the neighborhood. Streets were flooded as much as 2 or 3 feet deep, buildings were damaged, and several people and animals were killed.
Biggest controversy: It’s not clear exactly what caused the disaster. The 2.3-million-gallon tank burst with enough force that a few of the tank’s steel panels hit the girders holding up an elevated train and knocked a streetcar off the tracks. It’s possible a rapid change in temperature caused the molasses to expand—it was freezing the day before, but got up to 40 degrees, and a ship had just added a fresh load of molasses, which had been warmed to make it easier to transfer. It’s also possible the molasses began to ferment (not unusual, as besides being a sweetener and baking ingredient, molasses is used to produce ethanol, and the tank was owned by the Purity Distilling Company) and the resulting carbon dioxide raised the pressure inside the tank until it burst.
Wikipedia also says that the “tank was constructed poorly and tested insufficiently,” groaned each time it was filled, leaked so frequently that locals would stop by and collect leaked molasses instead of buying it at the store, and was painted brown to hide the leakage. Because it had only been filled to capacity a handful of times, the walls of the tank had suffered “under an intermittent, cyclical load” and were half as thick as they should have been, “even with the lax standards of the day.”
The tank was also likely filled to capacity on that fateful day, as Purity was “trying to out-race Prohibition” and distill as much molasses as they could, as the 18th Amendment was ratified the day after the disaster (although it wouldn’t take effect for another year).
Strangest fact: This isn’t history’s only molasses spill. In 2013, the Honolulu Molasses Spill saw 1,400 tons of molasses flood from a burst pipe. In this instance, there were no human casualties, as all of the molasses spilled into Honolulu Harbor, but the spill was devastating to sea life, as the molasses quickly sank to the bottom and caused deoxygenation, killing 26,000 fish and damaging the harbor’s coral.
Thing we were happiest to learn: For the survivors, at least, there was a pleasant aftermath. While the flood damaged the neighborhood, a sweet smell pervaded the North End for decades after the disaster. Journalist Edwards Park called the smell part of “a distinctive, unmistakable atmosphere of Boston.” The tank wasn’t rebuilt; instead the site of the accident was turned into a rail yard for the same elevated train damaged by the wave. Eventually the city turned the lot into Langone Park, with a playground, ballfields, and bocce courts, as well as a plaque commemorating the disaster.
Thing we were unhappiest to learn: As absurd as a wave of molasses flooding the streets may sound, it was a legitimate tragedy. One hundred fifty people were injured and 21 were killed, either drowned in molasses or hit by debris that was swept up in the wave. The Boston Post gave a sobering report: “Here and there struggled a form—whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell… Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings—men and women—suffered likewise.” A 1983 Smithsonian article described a child who was caught up in a wave of molasses that “rolled him like a pebble… He heard his mother call his name and couldn’t answer, his throat was so clogged with the smothering goo.” He survived, but not everyone caught up in the wave did—fatalities ranged in age from 78-year-old messenger Michael Sinnott to two 10-year-old children, Maria Di Stasio and Pasquale Iantosca. (Wikipedia lists the names and ages of everyone killed in the accident.)
Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: A foodstuff-related flood with a happier ending was the Pepsi Fruit Juice Flood, in which the roof of a PepsiCo warehouse in Lebedyan, Russia collapsed, sending 7.4 million gallons of fruit and vegetable juices into the streets and a nearby river. Thankfully, there were no deaths or environmental damage to the river, and PepsiCo offered to pay for all the resulting damages.
Further down the Wormhole: One more structural defect in Purity’s molasses tank was its rivets. Well before the flood, cracks could be seen around the rivet holes, and when the tank burst, passersby reported “a sound like a machine gun as the rivets shot out of the tank.” Rivets are usually associated with heavy industry and construction, but they’re also used in the more delicate work of making jewelery. People have been wearing decorative ornaments on the body since time immemorial, often of precious metal, but any material can be turned into jewelery, even living things. We’ll take a look at the fascinating and somewhat creepy practice of live insect jewelry next week.
59 Comments
Real life, beating fiction into submission for yet another year.
So “molasses in January” is not only not slow, it’s been clocked at 35 MPH.
Once this syrup hits 35 MPH… you’re gonna see some serious shit.
Shit was clocked hitting the fan at about 37.8 MPH.
“[T]he site of the accident was turned into a rail yard for the same elevated train damaged by the wave.”IT GOT KNOCKED DOWNBUT IT GOT UP AGAINYOU’RE NEVER GONNA KEEP IT DOWN
have you seen the state of rail travel in modern America? #NoVictory
Drowning in molasses sounds absolutely terrifying and sweet
The tastiest way to die?
if you prefer savory, you can choke on a carbonara
Probably still second to being deep fried in donut batter
“Eh, I’ve had better.”
–Duke of Clarence
What happened to ‘death by chocolate’?
Creepy Corporate Cover-up Factor: The tank would leak so much that the locals would scrape up the oozing molasses and put it into jars to take home. When the parent company was warned of this, they decided not to fix the leaks; they had the tank painted the color of molasses instead.
I get soulless corporations not caring about hazards, but shouldn’t they have been concerned about people stealing from them?
Nah, it was 1919 and whatever the people could walk away with compared to the two million gallons in storage was a small price to pay for doing business in the neighborhood, which was mostly made up of immigrant Italians who had no clout, and the company knew it. Joke’s on them though; six years later the creation of class-action lawsuits brought settlements for more than 100 claims and the company, which unsuccessfully tried to claim that the damage was due to sabotage, ultimately paid out more than $600,000 – about $9 million in today’s dollars.
Companies would love to be able to micro-manage the security of their product to the nearest spoonful (in the same manner as modern franchises like McDonalds and Starbucks) but there’s only so much they can do in the face of poor infrastructure, inefficient security and a large surrounding population who are living close to or below the poverty line.There’s a modern day equivalent in Nigeria where people regularly illegally tap into pipelines and steal crude oil by the bucketload. That too often ends in tragic consequences, only a touch more explosive.
I imagine actually fixing it was more like just totally redoing the tank, which puts it out of commission for a bit, which is a greater financial hit than neighborhood folks holding up a pan to catch molasses here and there. Gotta love whoever was sitting there crunching numbers on whether or not it made financial sense to do this right/well!
This, along with the Triangle Shirtwaist fire a few years before, shows how employers of the time did not even pretend to care about public safety….
The world needs more Francis Perkins.
Yes…of the time…
Read any article on a devastating fire (Triangle, Iroquois Theater, Coconut Grove) and there is going to be something along the lines of “the fire lead to new regulations..” The reason we need so much regulation is that we keep ignoring the ones we already have.
Couple that with the fact that the truly responsible parties for these disasters, management and owners that ignored warnings for purely financial reasons, were never held accountable. See also the Eastland disaster.
Not to mock the dead at all, but imagine telling your kids. Mommy died when all the molasses in the city drowned her. Its such a comically weird way to die. Its like being eaten by your cat.
Cats eating owners who live alone after they die of natural causes is apparently not uncommon. Although in some cases the cats could just be covering up the evidence.
I like to think its the latter. I must dispose of the evidence or they’ll think I killed him!
We have a cat whose previous owner died and was left in the house with it for a time. It’s a giant, strange, brute of a cat, and I often look at it and wonder if it has dined on ‘long pig.’
That very thing happened to my friend’s neighbor. Old woman lived alone, died of natural causes, and when a relative finally called the city to do a welfare check, EMS found her partially-cat-eaten corpse. At least, that’s the “official” story.I should have used that info to drive the price of the house down and buy it on the cheap.
My only goal in this life is to die in a way that can be described as comically weird.
The guy from Zero Punctuation once said all I can do is die in a position that confuses future archeologists. Yep!
Here’s a ham sandwich. Don’t chew it really good.
We lost Pa in the Great Hotdog Blitz of 93’…
Oh man, if I died like this I would want my gravestone to be an exploding barrel water fountain with a fleeing figure.‘His last words were, “Gergelgerglrmmmmmm”’
Other crazy part: if the tank had burst on the other end, it would have flooded the warehouse/distillery and emptied into Boston Harbor. Instead the surface that failed was the one facing Commercial Street.
I’m skeptical of the claim that the molasses could be smelled for decades after. I looked it up, and Boston had sugar refineries for many years. I used to live about a mile from a sugar refinery, and the neighborhood sometimes smelled like the brown sugar topping on coffee cake.
But were those refineries there a hundred years ago or did someone build sugar refineries there because it was the one place in the country that already smelled like sugar?
I worked near Boston’s South Station around the mid ‘70s (300 Summer Street), and if you walked over to the North End during the heat of the summer, you could still smell it then. I smelt it before I ever heard the origin story. In that era, there were no other refineries, only a lot of Italian restaurants.
Searching around it looks like there was a sugar refinery in Charlestown about 1.5 miles away from the site of the tank from 1960 to the 1980s. There were also a bumch of different candy factories in Boston around then — Necco, Tootsie Roll, others too — which are described as having strong smells.It’s always possible people were smelling decades old molasses somehow, but I would bet it was something much more recent.
When I was going to MIT in the mid 1970s (just on Friday nights, so I could meet up at MITSFS for the weekly trip to Chinatown, for House of Roy), but NECCO was on the other side of Mass Ave, in the middle of the MIT campus and even during the middle of the day, you could never smell anything coming off. Along the waterfront, you can’t even smell the gas tanks down on the Southeast Distressway.
Hey man, let us have our legends
We’ll take a look at the fascinating and somewhat creepy practice of live insect jewelry next week.
Was it hot? Would’ve been worse if it was like, boiling hot
The article gets into this; one theory as to why the tank burst was that they poured in some that was warm enough to pour, and the tank had only just warmed up from freezing weather the day before. So nothing in there suggests “boiling hot,” just warm enough to be liquid.
This is the sweetest disaster I’ve ever heard of.There. I made the obvious joke so no one else has to.
Treacle torrent.
If you want to lean more, Dark Tide is a really well-written book on the subject.It’s easy to make light of it, but this is literally one of the biggest industrial disasters in American history and more proof that companies will cut every possible corner to save a dime.
Granted every disaster involving a company usually has that lesson attached.
In other food mess-related news, apparently there’s a town in Spain that has an annual tomato food fight every year, which almost seems to demand a Wiki Wormhole article ;-)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Tomatina
I love Boston, it is one of those old distinctive cities like New Orleans and San Francisco with a lot of character. Even their disasters are interesting.
I can’t help but feel Walter Bishop is somehow connected for some reason …
This definitely could have been an episode of Fringe
I thought we agreed to call this the Masshole Mollasacre.
Try as I might, I can’t visualize the fluid dynamics of a flood of molasses so violent that it killed people. Maple syrup, maybe. But not molasses.
One of the greatest losses of life was in a fire house on Atlantic Avenue. Every living thing in the building was killed that day as the station was destroyed by the molasses. Every fireman, every horse in the stable, even the firehouse dog died.
One of the people who survived survived while being washed into Boston; in January. The molasses kept him warm enough to allow him to be rescued from the water.
The Dead Milkmen have a song about the Boston molasses flood.