Here’s the story of one of the most unusual—and messiest—disasters in U.S. history.
PRETTY SWEET
Have you ever tasted molasses? Made from sugar cane, it’s the stuff they use to make brown sugar brown. It’s also an ingredient in baked beans, candy, and even animal feed. And when mixed with water and allowed to ferment, it becomes an alcoholic beverage called rum. In its pure form, molasses is a very sweet, very dark, and very thick liquid—not as thick as peanut butter, but a lot thicker than honey. And it’s very, very sticky.
In 1919 the United States Industrial Alcohol Company kept an enormous molasses storage tank in downtown Boston, near the waterfront. The tank was large enough to hold 2.5 million gallons, and on the morning of January 15, 1919, the tank was full.
STICKY SITUATION
What started out as a normal day in Boston turned into disaster shortly after noon. People heard a low rumbling sound, followed by a huge crash—the sound of the huge tank bursting open. In seconds all 2.5 million gallons of that gooey molasses suddenly poured out onto the street.
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If you’ve ever been knocked over by a wave at the beach, try to imagine what it would have been like if that wave had been 15 feet tall, made of something thick and sticky like honey or pancake syrup, and was coming toward you at 35 miles per hour. That’s what it was like that afternoon in the neighborhood next to the tank: people heard the crash and looked up to see a huge wave of dark, sticky goo racing toward them, making what witnesses described as a “horrible, hissing, sucking sound” as it destroyed everything in its path.
GOO-TASTROPHY
When the tank burst, pieces of it went flying everywhere. One piece smashed into the towers supporting an elevated railway, causing a section of the track to fall to the street just as the wave of molasses was passing by. The train managed to stop before it fell into the goo, but many people on the ground weren’t so lucky. They got caught in the wave and had to “swim” for their lives.
Next the wave slammed into a nearby warehouse, smashing through the windows and doors and filling the building with so much molasses that the floor collapsed under all the weight. Everything in the building—including the people working there—fell into the cellar. The molasses destroyed other buildings too, including several houses that were reduced to sticky splinters, and the local fire station, which the wave knocked on its side and pushed down the street toward the ocean. (Luckily, it got stuck on some wooden pilings before it hit the water.)
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The whole disaster only lasted a few minutes, but when it was over, several city blocks were left under two to three feet of molasses, and hundreds of people (and animals) were stuck in the mess like flies on flypaper. Firefighters saved more than 150 victims by laying ladders across the goo-soaked wreckage and crawling carefully to pluck them out, one by one. Considering the size of the wave and the amount of damage, it’s a miracle that only 21 people were killed.
YOU THOUGHT YOUR ROOM WAS MESSY
The disaster was over, but the mess was just beginning. Removing a couple million gallons of molasses from downtown Boston wasn’t easy: fireboats spent weeks blasting it with water, and when that didn’t get rid of all the goo, workers covered the streets with sand. But it was too little, too late—the mess had traveled all over town. Cleanup workers got covered in the stuff and brought it home with them, as did the thousands of spectators who came down to the waterfront to see the mess for themselves. People got covered in the sticky muck and tracked it everywhere they went, smearing streets, sidewalks, public telephones, and even the seats on streetcars with a sticky, smelly brown layer of slime. Soon it seemed like everything in Boston was covered in the stuff, and it was decades before the smell of molasses finally went away.
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So what caused the tank to break in the first place? The investigation dragged on for more than six years, and in that time three major theories were proposed: 1) the tank was sabotaged by someone with a bomb; 2) the unsually warm January day had caused the molasses to ferment, giving off gasses that built up under pressure and made the tank explode; and 3) the tank was poorly designed and not strong enough to hold that much molasses. In the end investigators decided that the bad design of the tank was to blame, and the owners had to shell out nearly $1 million to pay for all the damage that it had caused.
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A: Because it’s the scenter.
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