Rather than fix the problem, the United States Industrial Alcohol Company had painted the tank brown so the leaks would be less noticeable. Nearby residents reported that the tank had leaked since its construction. In light of these details, it’s amazing that the tank held together for four years. Basically, it threw up a gigantic tank as quickly and as cheaply as possible, skimped on inspections and safety tests, and hoped for the best. The tank needed to be an engineering marvel to hold all that weight, but the company never even consulted an engineer on the project. The man who oversaw the construction wasn’t an engineer or an architect in fact, he couldn’t even read a blueprint. Modern studies have found that the tank walls were both too thin and made of a steel that was too brittle to withstand the volume of molasses. The company had been in such a hurry to get the tank built back in 1915 that it didn’t cut corners so much as it ignored the corners completely. Investigators soon found the real culprit, though: shoddy construction work. Another theory explained that the molasses had fermented inside the tank, which led to an explosion. The company claimed that since its alcohol was an ingredient in government munitions, anarchists must have sabotaged the tank by detonating a bomb. How did this tragedy happen in the first place? The United States Industrial Alcohol Company was quick to blame everyone’s favorite early 20th-century scapegoats: anarchists. In all, the cleanup effort required over 80,000 man-hours. Thanks to all the foot traffic of rescue workers, cleanup crews, and rubberneckers, the sticky mess quickly moved around the city via people's shoes. Eventually they realized that saltwater would cut the hardened molasses and enable them to hose it down the streets into gutters. In his book Dark Tide, Stephen Puleo wrote about one of the chief obstacles to the cleanup : firefighters couldn’t just use their hoses to blast the molasses off of buildings and streets with fresh water. Medics and police officers arrived on the scene quickly but had to slog through waist-deep goo to reach victims.Įven after the victims had been pulled from the muck, cleanup crews quickly learned that getting rid of 2 million gallons of molasses is no small task. Any flood would have been disastrous, but the viscous nature of molasses made rescue attempts even trickier. The flood claimed 21 lives, and another 150 people suffered injuries. They were either knocked over and crushed or drowned in the goo. The wave of molasses moved so quickly and so forcefully that anyone who was unlucky enough to be in its way didn’t stand much of a chance. The human cost of the disaster was even more grim.
The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities’s website claimed the property damage alone totaled around $100 million in today’s dollars. The molasses snapped the support girders from an elevated train track and smashed multiple houses. The wave moved at upwards of 35 mph, and the power was sufficient to rip buildings off of their foundations.
#GREAT MOLASSES FLOOD CORPSE LICENSE#
(Although Prohibition kicked in with Nebraska’s ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment the very next day after the 1919 disaster, the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, Purity Distilling’s parent company, still had a license to distill alcohol for industrial applications.)īoston Post, Public Domain, Wikimedia CommonsĪ giant wave of a sticky foodstuff sounds like something from a cartoon, but the surging molasses was a shockingly destructive force. The steel tank was enormous: 50 feet tall, 90 feet across, and capable of holding 2.5 million gallons of molasses. With a little know-how, one can turn molasses into rum or industrial alcohol fairly easily, and the Purity Distilling Company had built the gigantic tank in Boston’s North End in 1915 to supply its booze-making operations. While most of us probably think of molasses as a tasty ingredient in treats like gingerbread, the sticky stuff has quite a few other uses. The “Great Molasses Flood” tore through the city's North End and deposited so much gooey residue that locals claimed they could still smell the molasses on warm days decades later. On January 15, 1919, Boston suffered one of history’s strangest disasters: a devastating flood of molasses.
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