There’s a hallowed history of events from the Greater Boston area being propagandized into tales of heroic significance in our country’s folklore. The Boston tea party. Paul Revere’s midnight ride. Fucking anything that has to do with Tom Brady.
But somehow, when I mention that time unrefined liquid sugar turned the North End into Candyland After Dark, a lot of people from outside the region look at me like I might also be seeing dragons. Again.
Today’s Moment of Science… The Great Molasses Flood.
Molasses is the first stuff that’s recognizable to most of us as edible in the processing of sugarcane or sugar beets. If it’s not bottled up for a store shelf, it’s gonna go through some fancy pants chemistry to evolve up to one of two main possible final forms: candy or motherfucking drugs, baby.
Which is totally how they taught me in chemist’s school to say that it can be refined into sugar or fermented and distilled into rum.
Purity Distilling Company put this ginormous molasses storage tank into use at their Boston distillery in 1915. At 50 feet tall and 90 feet in diameter, that was too damn many imperial asstonnes of molasses to really comprehend.
Less than four years later, the tank was a problem. It’s speculated that it was leaking the entire time it was in service. Rather than fix the problem, it’s been reported that the owner had the tank painted brown to disguise it.
To call safety standards at the time ‘different’ would suggest they had safety standards. There weren’t federal child labor laws in the country yet. US Radium was telling their workers it was okay to swallow bits of radioactive paint every day. ‘Lead helps to guard your health’ was a slogan used to get people to plaster neurotoxin on their walls, and it goddamn worked.
So, a leaking molasses tank? Meh.
On January 14th, 1919, Purity Distilling received a shipment of molasses. The viscous sweetener was warmed up, helping add it to the cold molasses already stored in the leaking holding tank. The 15th was an unseasonably warm day. By which I mean it was a bit over 40°F, but that’s about forty more Fs than Boston gave the day prior.
A lot of cold molasses plus a lot of warm molasses plus some heat? Look, I’m no structural engineer, but from the sound of it neither was fucking anybody working at this place. It’s still unclear exactly what happened.
The tank’s slow leak didn’t give way to a trickle or a crack, no. It goddamn exploded.
At 12:30pm, a 2.3 million gallon wave of molasses, reportedly 40ft high, tore away at North End at 35mph. People, animals, and large bits of public transportation equipment alike were picked up and tossed through the air by the descending syrup. That night, temperatures dropped again.
Rescue workers spent days searching and diving through a waist-deep mess. Some victims were swept out to Boston Harbor, only to be found months later. People in the area coughed for months after the event. In all, there were 150 injured and 21 fatalities, including two ten year olds. Boston Harbor was said to run brown with molasses for six months.
So what happened to the people in charge? The distillery’s parent company, United States Industrial Alcohol (USIA) was rightfully dragged through well over a hundred lawsuits. The company claimed the tank had been sabotaged with explosives by anarchists, a story believed by precisely zero people, including the judge. With construction under the watchful eye of the facility’s treasurer, they had skipped standard inspections on the tank. USIA was ordered to pay the families of the victims the equivalent of over $100,000, a huge settlement for the time.
Did the prophetic quote’s origins have anything to do with the flood? Not a bit. Variations of the phrase started showing up through the middle of the nineteenth century, gaining popularity by the 1870s. This fast moving flood of molasses just happened to strike in January.
This has been your Moment of Science, wishing I could unread the phrase “everything that a Bostonian touched was sticky.” But I can’t, so neither can you.
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They put a sign up explaining the Great Molasses Flood next to a ball field in Langone Park off Commercial Street. I was in Boston in 2015 and wanted to get a picture of it. I wasn’t sure EXACTLY where it was, just the general vicinity, so I found a police officer and asked him if he knew where it was. The kid looked at me and asked, “what’s molasses?”