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Speaker 1: Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff

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Speaker 1: Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff You

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Speaker 1: Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore

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Speaker 1: the past one day at a time with a quick

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Speaker 1: look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome

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Speaker 1: to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson. In its January,

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Speaker 1: the Boston Molasses Flood took place on this day in

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Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen. Today, folks probably associate molasses more with food

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Speaker 1: or maybe with making rum, but in the early nineteens

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Speaker 1: it was a lot more important for munitions, especially because

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Speaker 1: of World War One. Purity Distilling Company, owned by the

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Speaker 1: United States Industrial Alcohol Company, wanted to fill that need

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Speaker 1: and make money. Even before the United States was directly

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Speaker 1: involved in the war, the US was providing munitions to

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Speaker 1: the Allies, so molasses was a big business To support

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Speaker 1: that whole goal, they built a tank in nineteen fifteen,

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Speaker 1: but they had a lot of problems. The ideal location

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Speaker 1: for this tank was near both the harbor and the railroad.

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Speaker 1: They needed the harbor to receive all the molasses from

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Speaker 1: the Caribbean, and they needed the railroad to ship it

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Speaker 1: out for processing. So they planned a tank that would

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Speaker 1: hold two point five million gallons of molasses. This was

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Speaker 1: fifty feet high and ninety feet in diameter, or a

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Speaker 1: fifteen meters high and twenty seven in diameter, and between

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Speaker 1: the permitting process and terrible weather and other obstacles, they

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Speaker 1: got way behind schedule and wound up with a team

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Speaker 1: of about thirty men working around the clock to try

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Speaker 1: to get this thing built on time, and they also

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Speaker 1: cut corners to try to make up for lost time

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Speaker 1: and spend less money. The material that they used to

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Speaker 1: build this massive tank was both too thin and too

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Speaker 1: brittle to do the job. When they finally filled this

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Speaker 1: up with molasses, it leaked so much that people in

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Speaker 1: the neighborhood would come scrape the residue off the sides.

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Speaker 1: They didn't really do much to fix that problem them.

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Speaker 1: They did cock some of the worst of it, and

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Speaker 1: otherwise they painted it brown so that the leaks wouldn't

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Speaker 1: show as much. By nineteen nineteen, with World War One over,

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Speaker 1: the need for munitions had really dropped, but the company

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Speaker 1: still had a license for industrial alcohol, and on January fifteenth,

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Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen, at twelve thirty pm, the tank, which had

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Speaker 1: been making ominous rumbling noises for a while finally ruptured.

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Speaker 1: This followed some unseasonably warm weather for January in Boston,

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Speaker 1: and the tank was mostly full at the time. When

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Speaker 1: the tank ruptured, it's steel plates were torn completely apart,

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Speaker 1: and a fifteen foot high or four point six meter

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Speaker 1: wave of molasses raced through Boston's North End at thirty

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Speaker 1: five miles an hour that's about fifty six kilometers an hour.

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Speaker 1: This was deadly. The flying debris flew at least two

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Speaker 1: hundred feet, knocked down girders of an elevated train. People

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Speaker 1: were knocked to the ground, and then because they were

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Speaker 1: on the ground, people and animals drowned in the molasses.

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Speaker 1: Buildings collapsed or were knocked off their foundations by the

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Speaker 1: force of it all. And even people who survived that

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Speaker 1: initial wave and were able to keep their heads out

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Speaker 1: of the molasses died because they just couldn't get out.

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Speaker 1: Animals that were in that position had to be put

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Speaker 1: down because there was no way to rescue them from

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Speaker 1: this just immobile, sticky mass. Most of the neighborhood's residents

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Speaker 1: were Irish and Italian immigrants. A lot of them did

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Speaker 1: not have a lot of money, and in the end,

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Speaker 1: twenty one people were dead and a hundred and fifty injured.

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Speaker 1: Clean Up took months. Investigations of what happened followed. There

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Speaker 1: were a hundred and nineteen separate civil suits that were

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Speaker 1: filed against the company within a year. Six years of

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Speaker 1: litigation and the longest most expensive civil suit in Massachusetts

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Speaker 1: history followed this. The owners claimed that it had been

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Speaker 1: anarchist sabotage, but there was no evidence that that was

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Speaker 1: true at all. In April, the state auditor released a

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Speaker 1: fifty one page verdict that found the company liabel for

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Speaker 1: what had happened, and the company later paid six twenty

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Speaker 1: eight thousand dollars in damages. Today, some people say that

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Speaker 1: on hot days you can still smell the molasses in

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Speaker 1: Boston's North End. There's more to this story in the

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Speaker 1: October fifth, two thousand nine Stuffy miss in History Class.

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Speaker 1: Thanks to Casey Pegram and Chandlert Mays for their audio

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Speaker 1: work on the show. You can subscribe to the Stay

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Speaker 1: in History Class on Apple podcast, Google podcast, the I

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Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, and wherever else you get podcast, and

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Speaker 1: you can tune in tomorrow for a constitutional amendment that

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Speaker 1: did not work out as planned