When I first stumbled on to the story of the 1919 Boston Molasses Flood I swore it was a joke. I mean surely a story about a wave of molasses travelling down streets, engulfing people, and animals couldn't be true. And in January! For crumb sakes, someone had to make that up.
But no, ninety years ago today Boston saw a disaster that killed 21 people and injured some 150 more. When a poorly built tank some fifty feet high and ninety feet in diameter was subjected to the growing internal pressure of some 8.7 million litres of fermenting molasses, made worse by the rapidly warming day, ruptured it was a major industrial catastrophe. Popping rivets reminded witnesses of a machine gun firing, and the ensuing flood (travelling at an anything but slow 55 kms/hr) mowed down people and horses, sweeping them along and suffocating many. Buildings were knocked off their foundations, and the immediate area was 2 to 3 feet deep in molasses. The dead were so coated in the brown syrup that identifying them was difficult, and the last couple to be discovered were impossible to identify.
It took months before the harbour lost its brown colour and some people in Boston maintain that on warm days the area still smells like molasses. And while it certainly wasn't a disaster on the scale of the Halifax Explosion a little more than a year earlier, it is incredible to think that that same brown liquid that is sitting in a carton on my shelf could have caused this sort of death and damage ($100 Million in today's dollars).
Well at least it wasn't beer.
Comments
10 responses
It’s a horrible story, but I’m still chuckling…I’ll think of it every time I make pancakes.
As far as the beer, “eight (deaths) due to drowning and one from alcohol poisoning.”
Count me in!
Better molasses than this. I’d rather a sweet death than a funky one.
Too much of a good thing?
The History channel actually did a show on this on their Disasters of the Century show. It was very interesting. The molasses is so thick and sticky that the people caught in the flood couldn’t stand or swim out of it. A lot of folks died in only a couple of feet of it.
I know bearswife. I keep thinking about that joke that it took the undertaker 3 days to get smile of their faces.
I suppose Michael. I can’t help but think about how horrible it would be drowning in that stuff. And then I was wondering why Sweet Death sounded familiar…
http://www.definition-of.com/sweet+death
Waaay too much John.
I’ll have to keep an eye out for that M&M. One of the stories I read, which relates to the smell. A journalist, who wasn’t aware of the incident, was talking to another one and said how he loves Boston, but why does it smell like molasses. I can not fathom that amount of molasses.
Oops! I just clued in that the “this” didn’t show up. Here it is…
http://michaelpealow.blogspot.com/search?q=gaza+sewer
Kia ora Clare,
I have spent a bit of time in old Boston, and I can attest to the truth of that, at least in my case, there was a faint smell of molasses near the harbour. I was aware of the incident so it may have been in my head, but it was there just the same.
Cheers,
Robb
Holy(land) shit!
I don’t recall the smell from my brief visit to Boston, but I’m not sure I’d notice anyway Robb.
Holy cow, I’d never heard that one before. Now it’s on my list of horrible ways to die.