The Great Molasses Flood: A Twenty-Five-Foot Wave in Boston — Boston, 1919

About this episode

On January 15th, 1919, on an unseasonably warm day in Boston's North End, a steel storage tank containing more than two million gallons of molasses failed catastrophically. The tank had been leaking for years — the company that owned it painted it brown so the drips wouldn't show, rather than fix it. When it finally gave way, the rivets shot out with enough force that men who had just returned from the trenches of the First World War mistook the sound for machine-gun fire. What followed was a wave of molasses twenty-five feet high, moving at thirty-five miles an hour, through one of the most densely packed immigrant neighborhoods in America. It swept away buildings. It knocked a firehouse off its foundation. It tore a support beam out from under the elevated railway. And because molasses cools and thickens, it trapped the people and animals caught in it the way flypaper traps a fly — rescuers spent days afterward pulling victims from a substance that would not let them go. Twenty-one people died. A hundred and fifty were injured. The six-year legal battle that followed would help invent, in the modern American sense, the idea that engineers could be held legally responsible for t