Local residents even put buckets under the tank to take home leaked molasses for themselves. It leaked so badly, the company painted it brown to hide the drips. An inquiry found the construction chief had skipped basic safety tests when the tank was built. Some people claimed anarchists blew up the storage tank. So, what caused the disaster? To this day nobody knows for sure. In the end United States Industrial Alcohol, Purity Distilling’s parent company, wound up paying $600,000 (some $6.5 million in today’s dollars) in out of court settlements. Then came the class-action lawsuit, one of the first ever in Massachusetts, followed by three years of hearings. In fact, there had been such a huge stream of sightseers and gawkers that they carried molasses home on their shoes until, as one witness described it, “Everything a Bostonian touched was sticky.” So much molasses had flowed into the harbor that it stayed brown until summer.
Salt water was sprayed on streets from a nearby fireboat and sand was dumped onto cobblestones. It took weeks for the North End to return to normal. All searched the muck for four days before calling it quits.
They were followed by Boston Police, the Red Cross, and Army and Navy personnel. Another 150 were injured, some seriously.Ībout 116 cadets from the Massachusetts Nautical School were the first help to arrive on the scene, wading through streets filled waist deep with goo while looking for survivors. When quiet returned, 21 people were dead. Coming to, he opened his eyes to find his three sisters staring down at him. A boy coming home from school was snatched by a wave and carried to the crest, riding it like a surfboard until plunging downward and passing out. Then there were the people caught in the flood. A nearby elevated railroad line’s girders were damaged with one car tipped off the tracks. Countless animals were swallowed up and suffocated.īuildings were crushed, in many cases lifted off their foundation and swept away. In those early days of autos and trucks, much freight was still delivered in horse-drawn wagons. Picture a wall of brown goo up to 40 feet tall racing along at 35 miles per hour covering everything in its path. It was sheer chaos, like a 1970s disaster movie.
The “gunfire” was actually the sound of the giant tank’s metal rivets popping loose, sending it crashing to the ground and unleashing more than 2.3 million gallons (about 14,000 tons) of molasses. There was a loud roar, followed by a long rumble. Just past noon that day, rat-a-tat-tats like machine gunfire rang out. Temperatures were first frigidly cold, then climbed to 40 degrees on Wednesday. The weather had been all over the place that week. It worked well enough … until January 15, 1919. Purity’s plant included a large tank for storing molasses. When molasses is fermented it puts the kick in alcoholic beverages such as rum and the “umph” in ethanol. The Purity Distilling Company had a facility in the North End. But this deadly tragedy was no laughing matter. This is the centennial of the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. Boston’s North End neighborhood had a sticky mess on its hands exactly 100 years ago this week.
0 kommentar(er)
