The Great Molasses Tank Disaster in Boston, MA, January 15th, 1919

January 15th, 1919, was a beautiful winter day in Boston's North End, an industrial neighborhood of factories, warehouses, and docks which included the wharf property of the Puritan Distilling Company, a branch of United States Industrial Alcohol. Dominant in that company's complex was a cast iron tank which measured 58 feet high and 98 feet wide, used to store crude industrial molasses earmarked for the manufacture of rum. The tank had developed severe structural problems and had been leaking so much that area residents were able to collect dripping molasses in jars for their own use. The company should have either built a new tank or at least stopped using this one but instead they took a chance and kept using the defective tank. It was a gamble and ... like all compromises of public safety ... a bill which would eventually have to be paid in great part by innocent victims. Instead of doing the right thing, the Puritan Distilling Company simply had the tank painted brown in order to conceal the stains created by the numerous leaks and hoped for the best.

Boston had experienced an unusual surge in temperature, which had shot from two degrees above zero three days before to the mid-40's on this date with destiny so a lot of people were outside enjoying the balmy weather. As the noon hour approached, workmen took their lunches outside to eat and children played around the tank. Fortunately, some of these kids were shooed away by a guard or called home by their mothers for their own lunch, for at 12:31 p.m. there came a loud roar as the tank exploded like a great grenade ... but that wasn't the worst of it.

The deadly barrage of cast iron shrapnel was closely followed by nearly two and a half million gallons of thick molasses creating a sticky dark brown tsunami wave from eight to fifteen feet deep which roared through the streets at 35 miles per hour, a speed which belied the old expression; "Slower than molasses in January." The great molasses flood overtook and drowned people, horses, and household pets. Waves of the heavy liquid hit some frame houses with such force that they collapsed. A fire house was destroyed and part of an elevated railway was knocked down. Some of those people in the streets who managed to survive the first onslaught were sucked down by the tremendous vacuum which quickly followed when the gooey wave crested and began to retreat. In all, 21 people died and 90 were injured but these statistics cannot convey the suffering caused by this awful disaster.

Families who had managed to escape the flood by rushing upstairs were trapped in the upper stories of their houses for days, unable to escape because of the molasses or to even see out of molasses-coated window panes ... this in a time before cell phones, television or radios were invented and many families didn't even have regular phones for communication. It took weeks of incredible heroic effort, dedication and money to clean up all that molasses and long after that it was said that on a hot day in the North End of Boston the smell of old molasses still emanated from cracks in the pavement.

After much investigation, it was determined that the construction of the tank had been poorly supervised, that its metal panels were deteriorating and leaking, and that it had also been filled beyond a safe capacity that day. The structure had been a disaster waiting to happen with the final straw being the sudden rise in temperature which had caused the molasses to ferment, creating gasses that further stressed the metal of the tank to the point of disaster.