Well we’ve heard of floods but this was one sticky wicky place. Believe it or not but just after the lunch crowd, a massive flood of molasses drenched Boston. Talk about a fly trap. How Sweeeeet!!!
The Great Molasses Flood, also known as the Boston Molasses Disaster, was a disaster that occurred on January 15, 1919, in the North End neighborhood of Boston. A large storage tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses, (enough to fill three and half Olympic sized swimming pools) and weighing approximately 13,000 tons burst open. The resultant wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour faster than any human could run. It killed 21 people and several horses and injured 150. The event entered local folklore and residents claimed for decades that the area smelled of molasses on hot summer days.
A steel tank holding over 2 million gallons failed because the walls weren’t thick enough. The citizens knew the tank leaked. The kids stopped by for their daily cup of molasses and households enjoyed their supply.
On January 15, temperatures in Boston rose above 40 degrees, climbing rapidly from the frigid temperatures of the preceding days. ‘Witnesses reported that they felt the ground shake and heard a roar as it collapsed, a long rumble similar to the passing of an elevated train; others reported a tremendous crashing, a deep growling, “a thunderclap-like bang!”, and a sound like a machine gun as the rivets shot out of the tank.’
The wave was of sufficient force to drive steel panels of the burst tank against the girders of the adjacent Boston Elevated Railway’s Atlantic Avenue structure and tip a streetcar momentarily off the El’s tracks. Stephen Puleo described how nearby buildings were swept off their foundations and crushed. Several blocks were flooded to a depth of 2 to 3 ft. Puleo quotes a Boston Post report:
‘Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage … Here and there struggled a form—whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was. Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings—men and women—suffered likewise.
The Boston Globe reported that people “were picked up by a rush of air and hurled many feet”. Others had debris hurled at them from the rush of sweet-smelling air. A truck was picked up and hurled into Boston Harbor. After the initial wave, the molasses became viscous, exacerbated by the cold temperatures, trapping those caught in the wave and making it even more difficult to rescue them. Some were crushed and drowned by the molasses or by the debris that it carried within. The wounded included people, horses, and dogs; coughing fits became one of the most common ailments after the initial blast.’
First to the scene were 116 cadets from USS Nantucket, a training ship of the Massachusetts Nautical School. The cadets entered the knee-deep flood of molasses to pull out the survivors, while others worked to keep onlookers from getting in the way. Red Cross nurses dived into the molasses, while others tended to the injured, keeping them warm and feeding the exhausted workers. Many worked through the night. The injured were so numerous that a makeshift hospital was set up in a nearby building. Rescuers found it difficult to make their way through the syrup to help the victims, and four days elapsed before they stopped searching. Many of the dead were so glazed over in molasses that they were hard to recognize. Other victims were swept into Boston Harbor and were found three to four months after the disaster.
Cleanup crews used salt water from a fireboat to wash away the molasses and sand to absorb it, and the harbor was brown with molasses until summer. The cleanup in the immediate area took weeks, with several hundred people contributing to the effort. It took longer to clean the rest of Greater Boston and its suburbs. Rescue workers, cleanup crews, and sight-seers had tracked molasses through the streets and spread it to subway platforms, to the seats inside trains and streetcars, to pay telephone handsets, into homes, and to countless other places. It was reported that “Everything that a Bostonian touched was sticky.”
Then across the sea. The Eiffel Tower in Barcelona. But for a quirk of fate. We all see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, but it almost ended up in Barcelona. Gustave Eiffel, the man who designed the Eiffel Tower pitched the idea of placing the structure in Barcelona. The city turned it down.
At first Parisians hated the Eiffel Tower. Built for the 1889 International Exposition, the Tower was supposed to be torn down and sold for scrap. The French army however, requested to keep the tower standing. With its lofty height, it was the perfect communications tower. On the turn of a (vote) dime history could be different.