Skip to main content

The Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

Image
By
See the source image
The cover of the Boston Daily Globe, January 16, 1919, detailing the disaster.

How slow is molasses in January?  Not as slow as you might think.  On January 15, 1919, it was estimated to have moved about 35 miles per hour.  That was the day a large tank containing molasses, 50 feet tall and 90 feet around, burst in Boston’s North End, spilling molasses across Commercial Street and beyond.

January 15 was an unusually warm day, hitting about 40º F, following a cold snap.  The rapid warming likely built up pressure that compromised the integrity of the tank.  Rivets popped out of the side of the tank at the Purity Distilling Company as the wall began to collapse, unleashing over 2 million gallons of molasses.  A wave of molasses 25 feet high rushed out, knocking small buildings off their foundations, damaging the girders of the overhead railroad, and flooding several blocks with anywhere from two to three feet.  21 people were drowned in the molasses, along with a number of horses.  Others were knocked out of the way by the air displaced by the wall of molasses.  In all, 150 people were injured.

To the rescue came the Boston Police, the Red Cross, the Army, and cadets from the Massachusetts Nautical School, keeping rubberneckers at bay and wading into the goo to pull survivors out.  In order to clean up the mess, crews dumped sand and salt water on it and it was pushed into Boston Harbor.  All summer the harbor was brown and sweet-smelling.  Well into the 1920s, the local rat population flourished.  Residents claimed for decades after that they could still smell the molasses in the area.

The owners of Purity Distilling, the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, insisted that “anarchists” had blown up the tank, and that they weren’t at fault.  The courts found otherwise, and after three years of litigation, families were awarded $7,000 per victim.  It was the first successful class-action lawsuit ever brought before a court in Massachusetts.  In total, the company paid out $600,000 in damages.  A later inquiry found that the construction company that built the tank made it half as thick as it ought to have been for the purpose it was used for, and that they never did even the most basic safety tasks.  This resulted in a flood of laws requiring that Boston industrial sites conduct such tests in the future.
See the source image
The aftermath of the burst tank.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How the Lemon was Invented

By
Lemons How do you make a lemon?  Silly question, isn’t it?  You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right?  That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy.  Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow.  You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true.  The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar .  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.  One f...
6 comments
Read more

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

By
Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”.  It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice.  Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes.   I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult?  Yes… and no.   The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult.  It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser .  Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word.  One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game...
1 comment
Read more

The Whoopie Cap

By
What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d ju...
Post a Comment
Read more