It took weeks to clean up the mess, using salt water to wash the stuff away and sand to absorb any remaining behind. Survivors were taken to a makeshift hospital, although the rescuers struggled to reach victims in time because of the difficulty of wading through the molasses. Rescue efforts were undertaken by several cadets from the USS Nantucket, which was docked at a local pier, as well as police officers, the Red Cross, and Army and Navy personnel in the area. Others succumbed to injuries and infections in the subsequent weeks.Īll told, the flood killed 21 people (along with several horses) and injured 150 others. People caught in the flow struggled waist-deep in the molasses, and contemporary newspaper accounts describe people being picked up and hurled several feet, crushed by and drowned in molasses. The onslaught was sufficiently powerful to flatten several buildings and do significant damage to the girders of the nearby elevated train. The the tank - which had just been filled to near capacity a few days before - had collapsed under the strain, and 8.7 million liters of molasses rushed into the streets of Boston, peaking in height at 27 meters and flowing as fast as 56 kilometers per hour. Witnesses heard a roar, a rumbling sound, and then a crash and a loud bang. In hindsight, a catastrophic failure was inevitable, and disaster struck on the afternoon of January 15, 1919. When a few local residents finally complained, the company painted the tank to match the stains, in order to camouflage the leaks. Some people even collected the leaked molasses for their personal use. Not surprisingly, the tank leaked from the start, showing brownish-red stains in stark contrast to the original blue paint job. Most notably, it was never filled to capacity to test for leakage, prior to being used to store molasses. Located in the North End of Boston, the tank was built hastily because of the war, with rather loose regard for safety regulations. At that time, molasses was a vital commodity, not just because it could be fermented to make rum and ethanol, but also for its use in making munitions as World War I raged in Europe. The owner of the faulty tank was the Purity Distilling Company. The incident reveals some fascinating fluid dynamics, according to a presentation at the annual meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics in November 2016. This is likely true, Puleo said, as in the immediate aftermath of the accident those buildings were filled up to the first floor with the dark, sticky substance.One of the strangest historical tragedies of 20th century America is the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, when tons of treacle from a burst storage tank coursed through the city’s streets. Through his research, Puleo met a man, a meter reader for Boston Gas in the 1960s, who told him that when he went into basements of the buildings across from the tank site to read the meters, he could still smell molasses. "For years and years afterwards, you actually could smell it." "All good folklore comes from somewhere," Puleo said. Puleo said that while some popular stories about the event have become fanciful and hyperbolic over time, that doesn't mean they're entirely false. The unnatural storm leveled buildings and flooded streets with up to 3 feet of molasses, killing 21 people and injuring 150 more. The violent burst caused a fast-moving rush of molasses through the streets, the 25-foot-high wave moving as fast as 35 miles per hour. 15, 1919, 2.3 million gallons of molasses violently erupted from a 50-foot-high tank on Commercial Street. What happened during the Great Molasses Flood in Boston
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