The Great Molasses Flood
It was lunchtime on the afternoon of January 15, 1919, in the North End neighborhood of Boston, MA. It’s a crowded area on the waterfront filled with commercial and residential spaces.
The temperature was uncommonly warm for a winter day, 41°F compared to 2°F earlier in the week. As you can imagine, it had people outside to enjoy it. One of the newest additions to the area was a 2.5 million-gallon steel tank filled with molasses that weighed 13,000 tons. This tank was owned by Purity Distilling Company, a subsidiary of USIA (United States Industrial Alcohol).
During WWI, which had just ended, the company would distill the molasses into alcohol to create bombs. It was like a massive molotov cocktail. The gigantic tank had been built quickly in the winter of 1915 during the war to hold the molasses by a team with no architectural or engineering experience…