January 15th, 1919, in Boston’s historic North End, Guiseppe Iantosca bundles his ten-year-old son, Pasquale, in two crimson sweaters. He reluctantly sends him out onto Commercial Street alone but keeps an eye on him from the window of his two-story apartment. Commercial Street was full of traffic below the shadow of the loud, roaring “El” train above. The salty smell of the harbor mixed with the sweet smell of molasses. The aroma came from a large storage tank, 50 ft tall, 90 ft in circumference, and full of 2.3 million gallons of molasses, owned by Purity Distilling Company. The tank sat between Commercial Street and Boston’s inner harbor, where young Pasquale, and many others walk, unknowingly into one of the weirdest tragedies of American History.
At around 12:30 PM, the ground suddenly began shaking. Some would say they heard a “thunderclap-like bang” and a rumble that sounded like the “El” train roaring across the elevated tracks from above. Unfortunately, it wasn’t coming from the “El”. The tank’s rivets began to shoot off, sounding like a machine gun firing into the crowd. Before anyone had time to react, the tank collapsed, and a 40 ft wave of hot molasses erupted, carrying with it steel shrapnel and gust of pressurized air. Guiseppe watched in horror as his son, Pasquale, was swallowed by the brown syrup. Buildings collapsed. Neighborhoods were wrecked. Trucks were flung into the harbor. A streetcar nearly tipped off its tracks on the elevated railway above. And many others, like Pasquale, became trapped as the molasses rapidly cooled, locking them in the thick, sticky syrup.
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.
The explosion would be the end of 21 lives and wounded 150 others that would never again find molasses quite as sweet.
Molasses is good for three things, baking, alcohol, and munitions. New England has been all about the syrup since the “triangle trade”, when African men, women, and children were taken against their will to work in the West Indies, where they produced molasses from sugar cane, which was shipped up to New England. Decades later, with slavery “abolished”, Boston still received loads of molasses from the Caribbean and New Orleans. Ships would pull into Boston’s harbor and offload tons of molasses into tanks for storage. The molasses would later be transferred via pipeline to a Purity ethanol plant in Cambridge.
In 1915, the United States Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA) bought Purity Distilling. Purity Distilling Company was a chemical firm that specialized in the production of ethanol through the distillation process. Isaac Gonzales, a maintenance worker, tried to warn USIA’s treasurer, Arthur Jell, that the tank was shoddy and might collapse. It freaked Gonzales out, and often he would find himself at the tank, late at night, sneaking around and offloading thousands of pounds of molasses into the Boston Harbor, out of fear of the day the unthinkable would happen. Jell simply shrugged off the warnings. He had the tank painted brown to hide the apparent cracks where molasses leaked. The locals knew about the leaks and would often fill up buckets of the brown liquid for their home.
The first responders to the atrocity were 116 cadets from the USS Nantucket docked by a nearby pier. They ran several blocks before becoming knee deep in molasses. Once they reached the disaster area, they began attempting what rescues they could, tending to shell shocked victims, many critically wounded. A buffer was placed between on-lookers who began roughnecking the sticky tragedy, gawking in horror. Soon, the Boston Police, Red Cross, and Navy arrived. They worked throughout the night. A make-shift hospital was set up in a nearby building. The molasses had cooled and become so viscous that it was a struggle just to walk through the muck. When bodies were found, the next challenge was prying them free. Some were so glazed in molasses you couldn’t make them out. After 4 days, they stopped the search. Several victim’s bodies wouldn’t turn up until 3 to 4 months later, floating underneath the piers of the Boston Harbor.
The area took weeks to clean up. Hundreds of people working day and night contributed to the effort. Salt water from a fireboat washed the molasses away, the rest was absorbed with sand. However, despite their efforts, Boston would remain sticky for months, and the sweet smell of molasses would linger for years. Some say you can still smell it on hot summer days. Bostonians, rescue workers, cleanup crews, sight seers, all tracked molasses through the city. It was on subways, streetcars, payphones, inside people's homes, restaurants, everywhere. Everything was sticky. That sounds horrifying.
119 residents brought class-action lawsuits against the USIA. 3,000 witnesses and plenty of lawyers discussed the disaster in court in a litigation that took 6 years. According to USIA, anarchist had bombed the tank, as ethanol was used in munitions. It was the early days of Bolshevism, World War 1 was still 2 months from ending, anarchist had legitimately blown up a few American industrial plants already, and there was a popular distrust of Italian immigrants. Being that Boston’s North End had a strong Italian population, USIA believed they had a strong defense. But they didn’t. Because that’s not what happened.
It was a structural failure. Arthur Jell’s dumbass didn’t perform safety test on the tank after it was built. What he should have done was fill it with water to check for leaks, respond to those groaning noises coming from the tank, tend to the leaks instead of hiding them by painting the tank brown, and listened to his employees, such as Gonzales, who had warned him of the danger months in advance.
In 2014, an investigation would reveal that the steel was half as thick as it should have been. The steel lacked manganese causing it to be brittle. The rivets were also flawed, which explains why the cracks first began appearing around the rivet holes. The warm molasses that had just been offloaded into the tank had reduced the viscosity of the fluid, causing rapid expansion, and a constant buildup of pressure. When the tank finally collapsed and the molasses began to spread, the winter air cooled it rapidly, causing it to quickly increase in viscosity, and suffocate its victims. The families of the deceased were given $7,000 ($104,000 in 2020). Overall, the company paid $628,000 (9.37 million in 2018) in total for the damages.
Some theorize that the Purity Distilling Company was trying to crank out as much ethanol as possible before prohibition cancelled their ass. The 18th amendment was ratified the day after the incident, a year before being placed in effect. This would help explain why the tank’s issues continued to be placed on the backburner as they continued to fill the tank to full capacity for the 8th time, finally resulting in its collapse.
So, let's recap, on January 15th, 1919, at 529 Commercial Street in Boston’s North End, a poorly made tank collapsed, exploding under pressure, giving way to a 40-foot wave of hot molasses and steel, flinging people, trucks, animals, and wagons, into the air, some into the harbor, debris buckling railroad tracks, crushing buildings, and smothering the neighborhood. 21 people were killed and 150 were wounded. USIA tried to blame it on anarchist. 6 years of litigation later they were found responsible and forced to pay for their victim’s families and the resulting damages. The muck was tracked throughout the city causing everyone in Boston to feel sticky and gross. The sweet aroma of molasses continued to haunt the city for decades as a bitter reminder of what became known as, the Boston Molasses Flood.
Bonus info:
-Today, 20 inches below the surface of the baseball diamond at Langone Park, is the concrete slab base of the tank.
-40 horses died
-There are 3 songs I found that mention the disaster:
1.Great Molasses Disaster-The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets
2. All Hands-Protest the Hero
3. Sweet Bod-Lemon Demon
-If you’d like to read more about the victims of the flood, click here.
Here are some strange facts regarding the incident.
Also, if you want to dive deeper into this I recommend reading:
The Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919
-By Stephen Puleo
Youtube Videos:
Fascinating Horror
Puppet History
There’s also a drunk history episode
More info here.
