By Mary Davis
Wednesday, January 15, 1919 started like any other winter day in Boston’s North End neighborhood. People headed to work, children to school, trains traveled on the elevated track, and ships docked in the harbor. Around 12:30 PM, the seemingly normal day changed lives forever.
Near the harbor sat a 2.5 million gallon tank designed to hold molasses. It stood 50 feet high and 90 feet in diameter. That’s a lot of molasses! Which made me wonder: What is this sweet, thick syrup made from that goes into one of my favorite cookies? This dark liquid is the byproduct of refining sugar cane or sugar beets. So what did Boston need 2.5 million gallons of this sticky substance for? Certainly not all of it for baking.
When fermented, it creates ethanol. Ethanol was used to make rum and industrial Alcohol, which. It was also used in making munitions like dynamite and smokeless powder. So at the time the tank was built in 1915, the world was in the midst of the First World War. It took gallons of molasses to make one liter of ethanol, which in turn could make one pound of smokeless powder. And the allied forces used millions of pounds of the powder in the Great War. That’s a lot of molasses, so it makes sense for a tank of that size.
Back to the disaster in question. On January 12th, a ship loaded with molasses docked in the harbor and offloaded 600,000 gallons of molasses, adding to the cold molasses already in the tank. Though the dark liquid had been warmed to reduce viscosity for transfer, it still took over a full day. This brought the total liquid within the tank to over 2.3 million gallons. The creaking, groaning, and dripping warnings of the tank’s demise went unheeded. These were normal sounds of the day.
Around lunch time on the 15th, the reverberation of machine-gun fire rang out in the North End and a low rumbling could be felt for blocks. However, it wasn’t gun fire at all. The rivets in the tank popped out in rapid succession. In an instant, the metal sections of the tank flew through the neighborhood as all those gallons of molasses flooded the streets in a tsunami, flowing in all directions.That's the tank in the background.
The wave was some 25-40 feet high at its peak (depending on the source I found) and raced at up to 35 mph. It uprooted buildings from their foundations and crushed them, threw a truck into the harbor, covered the area in a several feet of molasses, and destroyed a section of the elevated train track. Only moments before, a train had passed over that section, narrowly escaping disaster. The fast-thinking brakeman stopped the train, went to the guard shack, and told the guard on duty to stopped the next trains due imminently. Then he stepped onto the track, waving his arms frantically to halt an approaching train. The engineer stopped just in time.Flood Zone
As the sticky brown liquid hit the cold January air, it thickened, trapping everything in its wake.
“Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage [...] Here and there struggled a form—whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was [...] 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.” Boston Post
This tragedy claimed the lives of 21 people, including two children, and another 150 were injured. Horses, cats, and dogs also died. The clean up took weeks. Salt water was pumped from a fireboat to wash away the molasses, because they found it cut through the gelatinous mass better than fresh water. Sand was also used to soak up the molasses. Even after the area was cleaned, all of Boston was sticky from people tracking the thick syrup across the city. It was on subway platforms, train seats, telephone handsets, floors, in homes, and on every surface a Bostonian touched, which took even longer to eradicate than the disaster zone. The city smelled of molasses for decades after. They say that on a warm summer’s day, you can still catch a whiff of molasses in the air.
So why didn’t anyone take notice of the leaks, creaks, and groans on this day. Because the behemoth had been leaking, creaking, and groaning since the beginning, making this like any other day. People had been bringing containers (jars, cups, and cans) to the tank to fill with the seeping liquid for years. Instead of fixing the leaks, the United States Industrial Alcohol Company disguised the problem by painting the tank brown to match to color of the ooze dripping down the sides.
Several factors contributed to this tragedy:
• Warm molasses added to cold, beginning the fermenting process
• Unseasonably warm temperatures the day before of over 40 degrees
• Substandard building materials (metal too thin and too brittle for a tank this size)
• Overseer of the construction of the tank in 1915 had no architectural or technical experience, couldn’t read blueprints, and had no knowledge of safety factors, AND the tank was tested with only six inches of water
• The drop in temperature from the inside of the tank to the outside caused the molasses to cool and thicken (In summer, the molasses would have been thinner and more easily to escape.)
• Ignoring the signs of imminent failure (leaks, creaks, and groans)
• Being winter, the vent to allow the fermentation gas to escape was closed, allowing pressure to build
![]() |
Fatalities |
I will never look at the molasses cookies I love the same and will likely always think of this tragedy and the people who lost their lives. Bittersweet.
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmdEzJWgNfM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMWrk_94L8Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMPGm3OSvMg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adPuti-SL5o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-mzKm3NHqI
https://www.farmersalmanac.com/boston-great-molasses-flood-101323
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
Thank you for posting today, and Happy New Year to you and your family! I have never heard of this catastrophe!
ReplyDeleteI've heard of this event but not the details. So sad that carelessness and wanting to save money could lead to such a disaster.
ReplyDelete