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One of strangest disasters I ever heard of was the Great Molasses Flood of 1919.

If you had to choose how to die, drowning in molasses would probably not rank high on your list. On Jan. 15, 1919, 21 people, a dozen horses and at least one cat had no choice. This day was unseasonably warm, causing a huge molasses tank 50 ft (15 m) tall, 90 ft (27 m) in diameter and containing as much as 2,300,000 US gal (8,700,000 L) to collapse. The collapse unleashed an immense wave of molasses between 8 and 15 ft (2.5 to 4.5 m) high, moving at 35 mph (56 km/h) and exerting a pressure of 2 ton/ft² (200 kPa). The bulk of the devastation was caused by a “wall of molasses” which rushed through the streets at a speed of 35 miles per hour. It demolished entire buildings, literally ripping them off their foundations. It upended vehicles and buried horses. People tried to outrun the torrent, but were overtaken and either hurled against solid objects or drowned where they fell. The molasses wave was of sufficient force to break the girders of the adjacent Boston Elevated Railway’s Atlantic Avenue structure and lift a train off the tracks. Nearby, buildings were swept off their foundations and crushed. Several blocks were flooded to a depth of 2 to 3 feet.

A witness described the event: “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. Approximately 150 were injured; 21 people and several horses were killed — some were crushed and asphyxiated by the molasses. The wounded included people, horses, and dogs; coughing became one of the biggest problems after the initial blast.

First to the scene were 116 sailors under the direction of Lieutenant Commander H. J. Copeland from the lightship USS Nantucket training ship that was docked nearby at the playground pier. They ran several blocks toward the accident. They worked to keep the curious from getting in the way of the rescuers while others entered into the knee-deep sticky mess to pull out the survivors. Soon the Boston police, Red Cross, Army and other Navy personnel arrived. Some nurses from the Red Cross dove into the molasses while others tended to the wounded, keeping them warm, and made hot coffee—ironically sweetened to taste with the surrounding molasses—as well as keeping the exhausted workers fed. Many of these people worked through the night. The injured were so numerous that doctors and surgeons set up a makeshift hospital in a nearby building. Rescuers found it difficult to make their way through the syrup to help the victims. It took four days before they stopped searching for victims; many dead were so glazed over in molasses, they were hard to recognize. Two who could not be identified were found on the fourth day.

It took over 87,000 man hours to remove the molasses from the cobblestone streets, theaters, businesses, automobiles, and homes. The harbor was still brown with molasses until summer. Local residents brought a class-action lawsuit, one of the first held in Massachusetts, against the United States Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA), which had bought Purity Distilling in 1917. In spite of the company’s attempts to claim that the tank had been blown up by anarchists (because some of the alcohol produced was to be used in making munitions), a court-appointed auditor found USIA responsible after three years of hearings. In the end, however, the court ruled for the plaintiffs, finding that the tank had been overfilled and inadequately reinforced. No evidence of sabotage was ever found. All told, the company was forced to pay out nearly a million dollars in damages — a bittersweet victory for survivors of one of the strangest disasters in American history.

What happened? No one knows for sure. They do know that on the day of the explosion the weather was 40 degrees fahrenheit while on the day before it was 2 degrees fahrenheit. It is believed that the sudden increase in temperature caused the molasses to expand and the tank to explode.

If you can find it, Murder Can Be Fun issue 11 (I think) has a hilarious and very detailed telling of this very strange event.

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