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BostonMolassesDisaster.jpeg
Image:BostonMolassesDisaster.jpeg
The Boston Molasses Disaster occurred in the North End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts at the Purity Distilling Company facility on January 15, 1919. At the time, molasses was America's primary sweetener, used to make all types of confectionery, as well as rum.
A 50 ft (15 m) tall molasses tank containing as much as 2.5 million US gallons (9,500 m³ or 9,500,000 liters) of molasses exploded. The explosion was of sufficient force to cut the girders of the nearby elevated railroad and lift a train off the rails. Some nearby buildings were also collapsed by the blast. The molasses flowed out in a wave between 8 and 15 ft (2.5 to 4.5 m) high, moving at 35 mph (56 km/h) and exerting a pressure of 2 ton/ft² (200 kPa). Twenty-one people were killed and 150 injured as the hot molasses crushed, asphyxiated, and cooked many of the victims to death. It took over six months to remove the molasses from the cobblestone streets, theaters, businesses, automobiles, and homes. The harbor ran brown until summer. Purity Distilling paid out $1 million in damages (equivalent to around US$11 million today) in one of the first class-action lawsuits held in Massachusetts.
The cause of the accident is not known with certainty. It is thought the tank may have been overfilled due to an eagerness to produce alcohol, due to the impending passage of Prohibition, or it may have burst due to fermentation occurring within, or by the unusual increase in the local temperatures that occurred over the previous day; the air temperature rose from 2°F to 40 °F (−17 °C to 4 °C) over that period.
To this day, people say that molasses left from this disaster still seeps up from some of the streets on a hot day.
Further reading
- Puleo, Stephen Dark Tide : The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, Beacon Press; (September 2003) ISBN 0807050202
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