Today, people associate molasses with cookies and other sweets. Yet in 1919 molasses was used in munitions as well as food -- and Boston had one of the biggest tanks around. Learn how molasses flooded Boston in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert, joined by Sarah Dowdy. How are you, Sarah? I'm great? How are you? Katie? Could um? Today we're going to be talking about a story that sounds funny but it's really not. And to give you a little intro, some days when it's hot in Boston, even today, people claim you can smell molasses. Why would they say that, Sarah, Well, to tell you, we're going to have to go back to nineteen fifteen, when molasses was a much more important commodity than it is today. Right. I think the only thing I've ever used molasses for is maybe to make cookies con pie. Yeah. So they're constructing a tank in Boston, and this tank is a big deal. They've got thirty men working around the clock to build it, and it's behind schedule because there were all sorts of permits and stuff that had to be acquired. But in nineteen fifteen, the Purity Distilling Company, owned by the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, was not thinking of baking cookies with their molasses. Rather, they wanted to distill it and use it to make munitions. So World War One is going on at the time, and even though the United States isn't in the war yet, they are supplying weapons munitions. So this is a big industry and a lot of people are not happy about our involvement in all of this. President Woodrow Wilson gets a petition with more than a million signatures that basically says to stop sending arms two countries that are at war. But it's already underway. We're going to get involved, and anarchists are not happy. So unhappy, they're setting fires, you know, setting off bombs, making threats in New York City. Do see two bombs go off in Boston in nineteen sixteen, So this is a very um explosive time, no pun intended, or was it? Italian anarchists in Boston's North End are on watch. People are trying to make sure they're not going to get into trouble. And that is where our molasses tank comes in. So as the war is heating up, the United States Industrial Alcohol and one of its subsidiaries, the Purity Distilling Company, want to make a tank that can hold a lot of molasses. It's a lucrative business. This munitions manufacturing it is, and you want to have your tank near the harbor because that's where the ships come in with the loads of molasses from Cuba and other countries. And you also want to have it near the railroad where it can be taken off to get processed and turned into grain alcohol. But if you want such a prime piece of land, you're going to have to file all sorts of permits and spend all kinds of money to get it. So construction of this tank ends up being a pretty lengthy process getting these permits building it. Plus the construction isn't the best well, and they're behind schedules, so they're much more willing to overlook problems than they otherwise might have been. At the end, they've got thirty men working around the clock to get this thing finished, and a man dies during construction. There are superstorms that December that end up with twenty inches of snow in Boston. The rain, sleet, and wind are so bad that two roller coasters end up completely destroyed. And the guy in charge of this project is just at his wits end. His name is Arthur gel and just as one example of the shortcuts, he was willing to take because he was running late on his deadline. He only had six inches of water put in this tank that holds two point five million gallons of molasses to test for leaks, because you know, six inches in a two points that covers the ba. Yes, and you'd really call this a hard deadline that's approaching because there's actually a shipment of molasses coming up to Boston, so the tank tank really needs to be done or there's nowhere for all this molasses to go. One for the water thing, he realized not only would he have to pay to tap into the municipal supply, it would have taken weeks to fill. And he doesn't have weeks. He's got days at this point. So this tank ends up being really huge, even though it's not very well constructed. It's fifty feet high, ninety feet in diameter, and it holds more than two million gallons of molasses. And remember molasses is a lot heavier than water, So this is a This is a big, big tank. In fact, it's so big it's something of a neighborhood fixture, a leaky neighborhood fixture. It leaks so much that people come with cans and little buckets to scrape off the leaks from the tank to make lollipops, and the tank was painted brown to hide some of the leaks, because naturally you don't want to see a bunch of leaks in a two point three million gallon tank. But we're going to face forward now to nineteen nineteen. Munitions manufacturing no longer the hot business to be in. But fortunately for the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, there's another outlet for molasses because people are trying to pass prohibition, the eighteenth Amendment, and so you want to get as much alcohol as you can made before that goes through. So you want to make sure that your enormous molasses tank is full to the brim um, weighing twenty six million pounds. When it's full, that's a lot of alcohol, a lot of molasses. Neighbors and workmen have long reported ominous rumbling sounds coming from this tank. There was a guy who worked there who would even go in the middle of the night to make sure the tank had not exploded because something about it just wasn't right. But it turns out you wouldn't need to go check to see if the tank exploded. You would definitely know, and people unfortunately learned this the hard way. January nineteen nineteen at twelve thirty when the tank exploded. First there was a roar, then an explosion, followed by what sounded like the machine gun, which was the steel bolts popping out of the tank, and the steel plates of the tank were torn apart and propelled in all directions. So this was wasn't just a big leak. It actually exploded and the flying plates cut the girders of the l in A fifteen foot high, one hundred and sixty foot wide wave races through North End at thirty five miles per hour, And it sounds ridiculous, but you have to think of this huge, fast wave of thick, sludgy molasso, lions of gowns and molasses just plummeting down twenty six million pounds of molasses. There were fragments of metal two hundred feet away, and that original shock wave from it exploding just flattened people. But as they were getting up, there was a vacuum created by everything coming back, and then they just fell down again. So there are people and horses on the ground. As this wave is coming, the elevated train is lifted off its rails, their buildings collapsing, getting knocked off their foundations and getting buried. Yeah, the three story engine thirty one firehouse is completely knocked off its foundations. Electrical poles are falling over, and the wires are sparking in the molasses, and the rivets, like we said, are just shooting everywhere and bouncing off things. People died from being asphyxiated or smothered, some of them were crushed. There were horses shot by the police because they were stuck in the molasses and there was no way to get them out. There was a firefighter who was trapped under beneath the firehouse and he managed to keep his head above the molasses for a few hours before it's the coming and going under, because how do you pull someone out of a giant wave of molasses. The basements of buildings were just filled to the first floor with molasses, and it turned out that twenty one people died and one hundred and fifty were injured. At least twenty horses were killed, and the rescue effort for this ends up being pretty extraordinary. The first and the scene or a hundred and sixteen sailors from the USS Nantucket They're joined by Boston Police and Red Cross and some army personnel. They set up kind of a triage unit at the Haymarket Relief Station. Um actually removing molasses from people's noses and mouths so they could breathe. Um. The dead apparently looked like they were covered in heavy oil skins because they were just coated in molasses. The nurses are covered in molasses. They have it in their hay are molasses mixed with blood. It's just really nasty scene. And the cleanup took months, months and months. As you can imagine, can imagine what I mean, Just spill some molasses on your countertop. It's kind of nasty. Try doing two point three million gallons of it in an entire city. So they used picks and chisels to get rid of the molasses that it hardened, and otherwise tried to cut it with seawater and sand. It turns the harbor brown until summer. This is in January, and obviously the molasses gets tracked all over the city too, so you can just imagine months of stickiness in Boston as street car seats and molasses phones and trolleys. It's just everywhere and Oddly enough, the night after the disaster, when people are still cleaning, church bells start ringing because prohibition had just become law when Nebraska ratified the eighteenth Amendment. So only a month later February nineteen nineteen, the blame game again. Somebody is going to have to pay for this. Boston is spending huge amounts of money. They're all these dead. Someone's going down, right, And it turns into one of those evil corporations versus you know, poor victimized families kind of trial. And at first the chief Judge of the Boston Municipal Court holds us I A guilty of manslaughter um, and the d A presents the evidence to a grand jury and they think that the tanks are built shodily. They agree to that, but they don't go as far as manslaughter um. But by nineteen twenty there have been a hundred nineteen separate civil suits filed against the U. S I A. And this trial is insane. Litigation for this takes over six years. There's something like three thousand witnesses, thirty thousand pages of testimony, undred exhibits, and there are so many lawyers involved. Supposedly there wasn't enough room to actually hold all of them in the courthouse. Well, it's a it's a very odd sort of hearing too. The superior court judge, um, you know, has so so many lawsuits here that he consolidates the suits and appoints an auditor to hear the evidence and issue a report about liability and damages, thinking that from there the cases could proceed proceed to actual jury trials. He was kind of hoping it would streamline the process, but that didn't really with six years of litigation, I'm gonna say, I don't know about things moved as slow as molasses, okay, And typically as of the Evil Corporation, the owners claimed that it was anarchists sabotage and Italian anarchists had come and set a bomb off on their tank and it exploded, and how could they possibly be held guilty for something that these horrible America hating anarchistic kind of reminds me of Sacco and Vinceti reminds me a lot. At the same time, the Italian immigrant scapegoats similar story, and no one thought this was particularly credible. It was one of those things where you know, you'd think they'd issue a public apology, but instead they were trying to blame it on the poor anarchists. Yeah, and they're saying that there had been threats against the tank. A bomb had been discovered in another USA a I A facility, but they don't, like you said, they don't have any actual proof for it. Well, and even then it could have been true, but it was fairly clear that that wasn't what caused this. They had a policeman on guard at the tank to keep any anarchists with ideas of explosions in their heads from getting too close. Meanwhile, the plaintiffs are saying that the tank is the problem. They're showing that the material is too thin. They had an m I T professor who examined the shell and said it was too then there weren't enough rivets. The man in charge of construction was actually in finance and didn't get any engineering advice on it coming. And like we were talking about earlier, they're proving the construction was rut rushed and the tank wasn't tested properly. When they even used a much thinner kind of steel than they'd actually said they were going to use in their permit, so they weren't even truthful when they were applying for it. So this hearing goes on for years, and eventually the auditor, Hugh Ogden, um takes a whole year to review all the information he's been presented with. It ends up being the longest missed expensive civil suit in Massachusetts history. That's insane. So Ogden ends up giving his verdict fifty one pages of it in April, holding the company liable. He says that the U. S i. A. Gave no support of no evidence to support their anarch key theory, whereas he had plenty of very convincing evidence on the shoddy construction side when he said the factor of safety wasn't high enough in this tank, So the tank wasn't even strong enough for what they were doing with it. And because of this trial, there were regulations put in place that toughened up, you know, building regulations and specifically required that engineers certified structural plans, which I can't imagine we didn't have before. Then. Yeah, Boston requires that an architecture and engineer actually sign off on the plans and that they actually get filed through the city's Building department, something that it seems inconceivable that that didn't exist already by two point three million gallon tank by the twentieth century. It's it's just surprising. The crazy thing is that no one still knows what made that whole tank explode. There are different theories, and one of them was that the molasses fermented because the amperatures had gone at that time from two degrees to forty two degrees within a few days January day, so things were warming up and maybe that caused the problem. Or maybe because that hold shipment of new molasses was added on top and it was warmer and the old stuff was colder, or the tank was overfilled, or maybe there was just some sort of structural defect. But we still don't know why it blew up. But even though they don't know exactly what caused it to explode, then Odden recommended pretty generous damages for the parties involved. Six thousand going to the families of the deceased, twenty five thousand to the City of Boston, which obviously had to pay for this huge cleanup effort, and forty two thousand to the Boston Elevated Railway Company, which had broken girders probably prices to fix. Because these damages are so generous. The lawyers for the us I quickly agree to out of court settlements with um even slightly higher damages because they don't want to go through the price of a jury trial. Aside from the rumors that the smell of molasses still lingers in the North End on a hot summer day, um, the site is a park now has botchy courts, so um because they cleaned it up all right, maybe you should visit. 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