On This Day in History: January 15

The Great Molasses Flood

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I want to die in my sleep after a day of playing with great-grandchildren and drinking expensive whiskey. I certainly don’t want to drown in fucking molasses. But on January 15, 1919, 21 people went off to the sweet syrupy beyond in the Great Molasses Flood.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: January 15, 1919--

It happened at the Purity Distilling Company in Boston. Wait. A booze company? Yeah, a booze company, because molasses can be fermented and turned into ethanol. Did the flood happen because people were drunk on the job? It had more to do with the weather.

You’ve heard the expression “slow as molasses in January?” It doesn’t come from this event, as some claim, because that term was coined almost half a century earlier. It’s just that January is normally pretty fucking cold, and this January was no exception and when molasses is cold it doesn’t pour for shit. So why was there a flood?

Because it had been cold. There was a mega-size storage tank that held 2.3 million gallons of molasses at the distilling company. It wasn’t full, but it also wasn’t empty. It had some molasses in it, and that molasses was cold, because it was fucking January. Then, the day before the flood, a huge honking delivery of molasses arrived to top up the storage tank. And it was also cold and if they’d tried to pour it, they would have been there until fucking April. So they warmed it up and it poured nice and easy. Then the weather warmed up. You know what happens when molasses goes from being cold to being warm? It expands. Oh, fuck.

Yeah, the older colder molasses at the bottom expanded and the storage tank said I can’t fucking hold it anymore and it went kerblooie and sticky gooey black sugary shit fucking everywhere. It was the middle of the lunch hour and people were out and about then suddenly there was a massive thunderclap as the tank exploded and then someone was saying “Hey I didn’t order molasses on this sandwich” as a 25-foot-high wave of goo rushed toward them at 35 miles per hour.

It wasn’t just 21 people who died, but a lot of horses as well. Another 150 people were injured. The dead didn’t just drown, many were crushed. The wave had such force it hurled a truck into Boston Harbor. There could have been a higher death toll, but the training ship USS Nantucket was docked nearby and 116 cadets under the leadership of Lieutenant Commander Copeland ran toward the catastrophe, wading into the sticky morass to pull out survivors.

Cleanup took weeks, and people tracked molasses all through the city so that “Everything a Bostonian touched was sticky,” as one witness famously described it. Reminds me of having toddlers. For years people said that on a hot day you could still smell molasses in the area. Later, someone decided to refer to it as the “Boston Molassacre” and I think that person should have been punched in the face.

Thanks to Anne for the suggestion of today’s topic.

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