The news has been full of lots of disasters lately…. the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, the train wreck and fire in Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, and “locally,” there has recently been a number of trucks carrying hazardous material overturn on the Capital Beltway and that’s all in addition to the wars in Ukraine and Sudan. These brought to mind one of the more bizarre disasters that I remember reading about many years ago.
The disaster was kind of the result of one of those perfect — although bizarre, and sticky — storms. Around lunchtime on January 15, 1919, a 50-foot high tank at ehe Purity Distilling Company, located in Boston’s North End was operating full-bore. It was filled to near-capacity, containing two million gallons of steam-heated molasses that would soon be industrial alcohol. Next thing anyone knew, the tank burst, sending — did I mention two million gallons? — of warm, sticky molasses into the streets of Boston. This might have been funny if the molasses hadn’t been carrying huge, jagged sections of the tank with it.
Part of the “perfect storm” was that it was an unusually warm day in January — the temperature was 43 degrees, well above freezing. If the temperature had been closer to normal, it might have given the soon-to-be victims time to notice the oncoming calamity. But the thick liquid poured out like a tsunami wave and reached a speed of 35 miles per hour. The molasses flooded streets, crushed buildings and trapped horses…. it eventually killed 21 people and injured 150 more. The smell of molasses lingered for decades.
Witnesses later reported a banging and tapping sound coming from the tank. The sounds they heard were the rivets that had held the tank together popping loose. More than a hundred years later, analyses have pinpointed a handful of factors that combined to make the disaster so disastrous — among them, flawed steel, safety oversights, fluctuating air temperatures and the principles of fluid dynamics.
Investigations found several fundamental problems with the structure of the tank. Designed to hold 2.5 million gallons of liquid, it measure 50 feet tall and 90 feet in diameter. But its steel walls, which ranged from 0.67 inches at the bottom to 0.31 inches at the top, were too thin to support the weight of a full tank of molasses. Flawed rivet design was another problem, and stresses were too high on the rivet holes, where cracks first formed. Although molasses had been poured into the container 29 times, only four of those fills were to near-capacity. The fourth top-off happened two days before the disaster, when a ship arrived from Puerto Rico carrying 2.3 million gallons of molasses.
Both the inadequate thickness and rivet issues were signs of negligence, and structural engineers knew better at the time. But the tank had been built quickly in the winter of 1915 to meet the rising demand for industrial alcohol, which could be distilled from molasses and sold to weapons companies, who used it to make dynamite and other explosives for use during World War I.
Instead of inspecting the tank and filling it with water first to test for flaws, USIA ignored all warning signs, including groaning noises every time it was filled. There were also obvious cracks — children would being cups to fill with sweet molasses that drip out of the tank.
The clean-up crew pumped sea water from the harbor via hoses, but the molasses and saltwater didn’t mix, and the whole area was buried under brown foam. It took months before the streets of Boston were back to “normal.”
Since this was in the past, it’s kind of funny to read about it, even though it was tragic. But even so, this seems to be a kinder, gentler, kind of disaster than we experience today….who would have thought that anything as harmless — and sweet — as molasses could cause such devastation…..
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