![]() Meanwhile, rescue workers, sightseers, and residents carried the gooey brown residue on their clothes and boots to other parts of the city, making streetcar seats, trolley platforms, and public phones sticky. The harbor water, used to flush the streets clean, was brown until the summer. Workers used chisels, brooms and saws to break up the hardening gunk. Fire department pumps groaned as they removed thousands of gallons of molasses from cellars. The clean-up eventually took some 87,000 man-hours. It was on the floors, on the walls, the nurses were covered with it, even in their hair.’ At the destroyed city stables, police shot injured horses trapped in the molasses. ![]() Those already on duty were soon covered from head to foot with brown syrup and blood,’ the Boston Post reported. He said they looked ‘as though covered in heavy oil skins … eyes and ears, mouths and noses filled’.Ī makeshift hospital was set up at Haymarket Relief Station about half a mile from the waterfront, and volunteers removed molasses from victims’ noses and mouths so they could breathe. When Suffolk County medical examiner George Magrath arrived, several bodies had already been pulled from the molasses. ![]() They were soon joined by Boston police, Red Cross workers and army personnel. About 2.3 million gallons of molasses flooded the area, killing 21 people, injuring 150, trapping a dozen horses, and destroying buildings, homes and part of the elevated train.įirst on the scene were 116 sailors from the lightship USS Nantucket that was docked nearby. All caused by molasses.Īt the time, molasses was a standard sweetener in the United States, used in cooking and in fermentation to make ethanol, which in turn could be made into a liquor used as an ingredient in munitions manufacture, an aspect of the business that had been booming during the First World War.įirefighters and others stand in a pool of molasses after the explosion of a molasses storage tank owned by the United States Industrial Alcohol Company in Boston on January 15, 1919. By the time it passed, the wave had killed 21 people, injured 150, and caused damage worth $100 million in today’s money. Rivets popping from the tank scourged the neighborhood like machine gun bullets, and a small boat was found slammed through a wooden fence like an artillery shell. The Boston Globe reported that people ‘were picked up and hurled many feet. The wave broke steel girders of the Boston Elevated Railway, almost swept a train off its tracks, knocked buildings off their foundations, and toppled electrical poles, the wires hissing and sparking as they fell into the brown flood. He hung there as he watched a horse drowning nearby. It pinned Walter Merrithew, a railroad clerk on the Commercial Street wharf, against the wall of a freight shed, his feet 3 ft off the floor. The wave killed young Pasquale Iantosca, smashing a railroad car into the ten-year-old. On January 15th, 1919, in what was probably the most bizarre disaster in United States’ history, a storage tank burst on Boston’s waterfront releasing two million gallons of molasses in a 15 ft-high, 160 ft-wide waves that raced through the city’s north end at 35mph destroying everything it touched. In the background is the Navy Yard in Charlestown. The explosion of the steel vat, ninety feet in diameter and fifty-two feet in height, caused 2.3 million gallons of molasses to flood the area, killing 21 people and injuring 150. between Copps Hill and the playground of North End Park in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 15, 1919. This aerial view shows the site of the molasses storage tank explosion in the section of Commercial St.
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