Speaker 1: Okay, so just stop for a second and try to
picture the most I don't know if the most absurd
disaster you can possibly think of. I'm not talking about
a volcano or an earthquake. I'm talking about a giant, deadly,
tidle wave. But and this is the key part, the
wave isn't made of water.
Speaker 2: It's made of molasses, right, something you put on your pancakes.
It sounds like a joke, like a really dark cartoon premise,
but this was terrifyingly real. January nineteen nineteen, Boston, A
giant steel tank holding over two million gallons of molasses
just it completely falls apart and it unleashes this thirty
five foot high wall of syrup, moving at thirty five
miles an hour, right into one of the busiest parts
of the city.
Speaker 1: And that absurdity is what grabs you. It really does.
But the story underneath the tragedy and what came after,
that's what changed everything.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. Today we are diving deep into
the Great Boston Molasses Flood of nineteen nineteen. We're going
to explore how this almost comical catastrophe was really born
from corporate greed and just shocked neglect and how it
didn't just kill twenty one people, it ended up rewriting
the entire rule book for how we build things safely
in the modern world exactly. And that's what's so incredible
about this story. Every time you walk into a building today,
every single time you see an engineer's stamp on a blueprint,
you are, in a very real way, benefiting from the
legal fallout of people drowning in molasses a century ago.
This was not a freak accident. We're going to show you.
This was a disaster that was just waiting to happen,
a perfect storm of bad engineering, a frantic rush for
profit before prohibition kicked in, and a legal system that
just wasn't ready for it.
Speaker 1: This is a story about why that building inspector you
see on a construction site is so important. So to
really get this, you have to understand where this happened.
This tank wasn't in some deserted industrial wasteland. It was
literally looming over people's homes. Let's start there, Part.
Speaker 2: One, Boston's crowded Crucible.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, the setting is everything, So picture Boston's North End
nineteen nineteen. It's a tiny little patch of land barely
a square mile, but right up against the waterfront on
Commercial Street, and it is just buzzing with activity. This
isn't just a place where stuff is stored. People live here,
they work here. And if you go to the North
End today you can still feel that. You know, the
narrow streets, the brick buildings all pressed up against each other.
It's got that energy. But back then it was even
more intense, and it had changed a lot. Right, This
used to be a wealthy area.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, in the eighteenth century it was prime real estate.
Paul Revere lived there. His house is still standing. It
was all mansions. But then the Port Boston Harbor it
just exploded into this huge industrial engine, and the wealthy families, well,
they moved out. They didn't want to live with the
noise and the smells.
Speaker 1: Of the docks, and so a new wave of people moved.
Speaker 2: In a tidal wave. Really, it became the first stop
for European immigrants, first the Irish than Jewish families, and
by the early nineteen hundreds it was overwhelmingly.
Speaker 1: Italian and that led to just unbelievable density. I read
that by nineteen fifteen you had forty thousand people living
in that one square mile forty tho.
Speaker 2: It was one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in
the entire United States. It was an absolute powder keg,
just in terms of human vulnerability. All these people packed
into tenements with very little infrastructure to support them.
Speaker 1: And the tank itself was right there on Commercial Street
in the thick of it all.
Speaker 2: It wasn't just homes. You had the city's public works
building right there, the Base State Railway terminal, little shops,
food stalls, horse drawn carts everywhere. At lunchtime on a
regular weekday, which this was, the streets were just choked
with people, kids playing, workers on their lunch break, people
rushing to catch the train, just.
Speaker 1: Life happening right under the shadow of this monster. The
colossus on Commercial Street, fifty feet tall. It's designed to
hold two and a half million gallons of molasses. I mean,
can you even picture that. It's like three and a
half Olympic swimming pools stacked on top of each.
Speaker 2: Other, and it would have just dominated the skyline of
that neighborhood, a huge, dark steel cylinder towering over these
three and four story brick tenements, and you.
Speaker 1: Just have to wonder, how on earth did anyone think
it was a good idea to put that right there?
Speaker 2: Well, that question, that's the key, and it takes us
right into part two, the sweet rush and the ignored warnings,
because the answer is a really toxic mix of corporate
desperation and just complete social indifference.
Speaker 1: So who owned it?
Speaker 2: The tank was operated by a company called Purity Distilling,
which is owned by a bigger company, United States Industrial
Alcohol or USIA, and USIA was in a bit of
a panic because of two huge historical events that were
happening at the same time.
Speaker 1: Okay, what were they?
Speaker 2: The first was World War One. During the war, molasses
was actually a really important strategic material for.
Speaker 1: What I mean. I know, you can make rum, but for.
Speaker 2: A war industrial alcohol, they would distill the molasses to
make ethanol, and that ethanol was a key component in
making munitions explosives.
Speaker 1: Wow, so the sweet stuff was being turned into bombs
pretty much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a sort of higher tech version of a
Molotov cocktail. As one source put it, molasses was fuel
for the war machine.
Speaker 1: But the war ended in November nineteen eighteen, so I'm
guessing the demand for bomb making materials just evaporated.
Speaker 2: It fell off a cliff, and suddenly USIA has this
massive infrastructure, including this brand new, enormous tank in Boston
and a supply chain for molasses, but no one's buying
their main product.
Speaker 1: So they needed to pivot instantly.
Speaker 2: And the pivot was obvious. If you can make industrial alcohol,
you can make rump. So they decided to go from
bombs to booze.
Speaker 1: Which seems like a smart business move except for one
very big problem looming on the horizon.
Speaker 2: The massive problem the prohibition clock.
Speaker 1: Ah right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: By this point, the Eighteenth Amendment had already been pushed through.
Everyone knew that national prohibition was coming. The official date
was set for January nineteen twenty, exactly one year away.
After that, selling liquor legally in the United States would
be over.
Speaker 1: So they had a one year window, a twelve month
all out sprint to make and sell as much rum
as they possibly could before the taps were turned off
for good.
Speaker 2: It was a manic profit at all costs race against time.
You can just imagine the meetings, maximize production, cut every corner,
ignore any small problems, just fill that tank and get
the rum out the door.
Speaker 1: So the pressure on that tank wasn't just you know,
physical from the molasses. It was financial, immense financial pressure, and.
Speaker 2: That pressure, that desperation. It explains what happened. Just two
days before the disaster. On January thirteenth, nineteen nineteen, they
got a new shipment of molasses and they filled that
tank right to the very top to the brim two
point three million gallons. And you have to remember molasses
is way heavier than water, raise about twelve pounds per gallon.
So the stress on the steel walls of that tank,
what engineers call hoops stress, was just astronomical. It was
at its absolute maximum.
Speaker 1: Okay, but if the tank was so dodgy, and we're
about to get into just how dodgy it was, how
did they get away with it? Weren't there inspectors building codes.
Speaker 2: That's the crazy part. This was before for any of that.
Really structural safety was basically a gentleman's agreement. There was
no law that said an engineer had to sign off
on the stress calculations. There was no city inspector who
was required to check the thickness of the steel. If
the company paid for a permit and said it's fine,
the city basically had to take their word for.
Speaker 1: It unless it was like actively falling over.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and USIA just kept saying it's fine, it's fine,
even though all the evidence, all the warning signs were
screaming that it was not fine.
Speaker 1: So what were those signs. This wasn't something that failed silently,
was it not?
Speaker 2: At all? It was a disaster in slow motion from
the very beginning. The tank itself was a rush job.
It was built too fast by workers who weren't skilled
in that kind of construction, and the steel plates they
used were way too thin for a tank of that
size holding a liquid that dense.
Speaker 1: So it started leaking.
Speaker 2: Almost from day one. I mean, this is one of
the most incredible details. It leaked so much that neighborhood kids,
mostly the Italian immigrant children, would bring buckets and pale
to the base of the tank to collect the runoff.
They'd take it home for their families to use.
Speaker 1: Wait, really, it was leaking that much, not just a drip,
but enough to fill buckets.
Speaker 2: We're talking long, fifty foot brown streaks of molasses constantly
running down the side of this black steel tank. It
was an open secret. People just got used to it.
The company even tried to paint the tank brown to
hide the leaks.
Speaker 1: That's that is just stunning negligence. They literally tried to
paint over the problem.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just the visible leaks. There were audible
warnings too. City workers who had offices nearby told the
company that the tank would and this is a quote,
grown and shutter and shape every time there was a
delivery of molasses.
Speaker 1: You could hear it straining.
Speaker 2: Yes, you could hear the metal under stress. And for
two days after they filled it to the top on
January thirteenth, it groaned constantly.
Speaker 1: So you have engineers who must have known it was
under design, You have neighbors who can see it leaking constantly,
you have city workers who can hear it about to fail,
and nothing happen, happens. Why didn't the city step in?
Why was there, as you said, almost no official outrage.
Speaker 2: And that's where the social part of this story becomes
so important and so tragic. The North End was, as
we said, ninety eight percent Italian immigrants. Most didn't speak English,
many were not yet citizens. They were politically speaking, completely invisible.
Speaker 1: They had no political voice, They couldn't vote, they didn't
have powerful lobbyists at City Hall arguing on their.
Speaker 2: Behalf exactly, And I think you could be pretty sure
that if USIA had tried to build that same leaky, groaning,
dangerous tank in a wealthy neighborhood like Beacon Hill, it
would have been shut down by lawsuits before the first
seal plate was in place.
Speaker 1: But because it was in the North End, they knew
they could get away with it.
Speaker 2: The sources are pretty clear that the location was chosen
because there would be really no opposition. USIA basically had
contempt for the safety of that community because that community
had no power to fight back.
Speaker 1: It's just this bitter irony, isn't it. The very people
who were ignored, the ones with no political power. Their
tragedy is what ends up creating safety standards that protect everyone,
powerful or not.
Speaker 2: It's the central tragedy and the ultimate legacy of the
whole event. The political vacuum created the physical vulnerability chilling.
Speaker 1: And that vulnerability, combined with that frantic rush for profit,
meant that on January fifteenth, at lunchtime, that tank was
a bomb waiting to go off. Let's get into it
Part three, The twenty five minute Catastrophe.
Speaker 2: The time is just after twelve thirty in the afternoon.
It's an unseasonably warm day for Boston in January, about
forty degrees fahrenheit, and that little bit of warmth might
have been the final straw. It could have caused the
molasses inside the tank to ferment slightly, creating CO two gas,
which would have increased the internal pressure just that tiny
bit more a point, a tipping point, and the eyewitness
accounts of what happened next are just their visceral. There
was a patrolman, Frank McManus, who was on his beat nearby.
He heard two distinct sounds.
Speaker 1: What were they?
Speaker 2: The first was what he called a tremendous rumbling, grinding sound.
That was the sound of the steel plates beginning to tear.
Speaker 1: And the second sound, this is the one that gets me.
He heard rat a tat, tat. He thought it was
a machine gun, right.
Speaker 2: But it wasn't. That was the sound of thousands of
steel rivets, the bolts holding the tank together, popping off
one by one under the immense pressure.
Speaker 1: So the tank was literally unzipping itself. It wasn't just
a leak, It just blew apart.
Speaker 2: It completely disintegrated, in one violent explosive burst.
Speaker 1: And McManus he had the presence of mind to get
to a call box.
Speaker 2: He did, and he made what has to be one
of the strangest emergency calls in history. He told the
dispatcher sent all available rescue personnel immediately, there's a wave
of molasses coming down Commercial Street.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine what that dispatcher must have been thinking.
Speaker 2: Probably that he was dealing with a prank call, but
it was real. When the tank failed, all two point
three million gallons of that molasses shot outwards, accelerating almost
instantly to about thirty five miles per hour up a
car exactly. The initial wave was about thirty five feet high,
and then it sort of leveled off into this churning,
twenty foot high, one hundred and sixty foot wide wall
of brown sludge.
Speaker 1: And because it's molasses, it's not like a water wave
that would just splash. It had weight, It had mass.
Speaker 2: Immense mass. It was a liquid battering ramp. It didn't
just flow around things, it obliterated them. The sources say
it literally scoured the waterfront. It just picked up everything
in its.
Speaker 1: Past, people, horses, carts.
Speaker 2: Even parts of the elevated railway. It knocked the train
car clean off the tracks. But the firehouse example is
maybe the most shocking illustration of its power.
Speaker 1: Yeah, tell us about that.
Speaker 2: So, fire Station thirty one was about eighty feet away
from the tank. The wave hit. It was such force
that it lifted the entire building off its foundation and
shoved its sideways. The second floor collapsed and just pancaked
down onto the first floor.
Speaker 1: And there were firefighters inside.
Speaker 2: Yes, several of them were trapped in this tiny eighteen
inch crawl space between the collapse floors, and the molasses
was pouring in rising around them. They were struggling just
to keep their heads above the goo. It's a miracle
any of them survived.
Speaker 1: That's a level of horror that's hard to even comprehend.
Instantaneous destruction.
Speaker 2: It was for many people. The initial impact was instantly fatal,
but the disaster had two phases, and the second one
was in some ways even more cruel.
Speaker 1: The sticking exactly.
Speaker 2: The initial blast was over in minutes, but once the
waves stopped moving, the cold January air started to cool
the molasses down, it congealed, It got thicker and stickier
and heavier. It became this giant, inescapable trap. People were
literally glued in place.
Speaker 1: So rescuers couldn't even get to them.
Speaker 2: They couldn't. They were trying to wade through this stuff,
and it was like trying to walk through quicksand or
wet tar. Many of the twenty one people who died
didn't die from the impact. They drowned or suffocated hours later,
stuck fast in the cold, thick molasses while rescuers tried
desperately to reach them.
Speaker 1: I just I can't imagine the logistics of that rescue.
How do you even free someone from that?
Speaker 2: It was frantic. Sailors jumped off ships in the harbor
to help. Firefighters laid ladders across the surface to try
and distribute their weight so they wouldn't sink in. They
were up to their waists, sometimes their chests in this stuff,
fighting against time as it got colder and harder. It
was a gruesome, sticky battlefield.
Speaker 1: Which brings us right to the cleanup part four, the
sticky aftermath, because once the rescue was over, the recovery
had to begin, and the scene must have been just apocalyptic.
Speaker 2: Commercial Street was just splinters. Buildings were gone, and the
entire area was buried under this layer of what was
described as basically tar.
Speaker 1: Two point three million gallons of it.
Speaker 2: It was a problem nobody'd ever fased before. If it's water,
it drains. If it's mud, you can shovel it. But
molasses just congeals. It's too sticky to shovel properly, but
it's too thick to just wash away.
Speaker 1: What did they even try to do?
Speaker 2: Well? First, they tried blasting it with high pressure hoses
from the fire hydrants. The idea was just to push
it all into the harbor, but that didn't no because
the high sugar content made it resistant to fresh water.
The water just sort of rolled over the top or
mixed in a little bit, creating an even bigger volume
of sticky mass.
Speaker 1: So then what picks and shovels.
Speaker 2: They tried that too, but the molasses would just sort
of reform and stick to the tools. They even tried
something really extreme. They tried to burn it off with
gas torches burning molasses.
Speaker 1: The smell must have been unbelievable.
Speaker 2: Oh just imagine burnt sugar, smoke and whatever else was
mixed in with the debris. And it didn't even work.
It just created this hard carameized crust on top, which
insulated the gow underneath and made it even harder to
get at.
Speaker 1: So they're just stuck. The whole neighborhood is just trapped
in syrup.
Speaker 2: It seemed that way for weeks until one firefighter had
a brilliant IDEA. Okay, he realized it was a chemical problem.
If fresh water didn't work, maybe a different kind of
water would. He suggested pumping salt water in from Boston
Harbor ah.
Speaker 1: The salt.
Speaker 2: The salt was the key. For whatever chemical reason, the
salt in the ocean water was able to cut through
the molasses. It broke down the viscosity just enough that
they could finally start washing it away.
Speaker 1: So they just started flooding the streets with ocean water.
Speaker 2: Millions and millions of gallons of it, pumping it out
of the harbor onto the streets, and then letting it
all flow back into the harbor, carrying the molasses with it.
Speaker 1: The scale of that is just mind boggling.
Speaker 2: It took six months. Six months of this worked just
for the North End to get back to something resembling normal,
and every basement, every cellar in the area was filled
solid with this stuff.
Speaker 1: I read about a banana salesman he'd hid in his
life savings over four thousand dollars in cash in his
shop's basement, and they.
Speaker 2: Had to dig out a solid twelve feet of molasses
and debris just to find his money. Think about that
shoveling through twelve feet of cold, hard tar.
Speaker 1: And the legacy, the physical mark on the city. It
lasted for so long.
Speaker 2: The harbor was brown for months. But the smell, that's
what people remembered. Local said that for years, even decades later,
on a really hot summer day, you could still get
a faint, sweet, sickly smell of molasses rising up from
the ground.
Speaker 1: It was a sensory ghost of the disaster exactly. So
the physical cleanup took half a year, But the real
lasting change that wasn't about cleaning the streets. It was
about cleaning up the law. The company USIA was in
a world of trouble. Then that takes us to our
final part five. The unintended legacy right.
Speaker 2: Usaa's negligence was just so obvious, the shoddy construction, the
ignored leaks, the mad dash for profit. By nineteen twenty,
they were facing over one hundred separate civil lawsuits, from
the families of the dead, from the one hundred and
fifty people who were seriously injured, from businesses like the
railway whose property was destroyed.
Speaker 1: So how did the carts even handle that one hundred
different trials.
Speaker 2: Well, they did something that was at the time revolutionary.
They consolidated all those suits. One hundred and nineteen different
plaintiffs all grouped together to sue USIA as a single entity,
and in doing so, they essentially created the blueprint for
the modern class action lawsuit.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, So this sticky, bizarre disaster is the reason
we have class action suits today for oil spills or
faulty products.
Speaker 2: It was the first really significant one against a major
US corporation. It established a legal framework that lets hundreds
or thousands of ordinary people banned together to take on
a corporate giant. It completely leveled the playing field.
Speaker 1: That's huge. That's a massive legacy on its own.
Speaker 2: It is, But the trial itself said another maybe even
more important precedent. The case dragged on for five years,
and USI's main defense was to claim it was an
act of God. They tried to argue that the tank
had been sabotaged or that it was just an unavoidable accident.
Speaker 1: So how did the plaintiffs prove it was negligence?
Speaker 2: The use science, And this is the other big legal first.
This trial was one of the first in American history
to rely heavily on expert testimony as evidence.
Speaker 1: So they brought in scientists.
Speaker 2: They brought in structural engineers and physicists, and they basically
put the tank on trial. Didn't just have people say
it leaked. They had experts coming with calculations. They calculated
the exact hoop stress on the steel plates from two
point three million gallons of dense molasses, and then they
proved with math that the steel used was only half
as thick as it needed to be to handle that
pressure safely.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't just that it failed. They proved it
was designed to fail exactly.
Speaker 2: They proved it was a result of deliberate cost cutting,
not an accident, and the judge accepted this scientific evidence
as legal.
Speaker 1: Proof, which must have been a game changer, a.
Speaker 2: Total game changer. In nineteen twenty five, the judge ruled
that USIA was one hundred percent responsible due to negligence.
They had to pay out about six hundred thousand dollars,
which is around nine million in today's money.
Speaker 1: But like you said, the money wasn't the biggest thing.
It was the aftermath of that verdict.
Speaker 2: The verdict was the catalyst. It created this huge public
outcry for reform. People were horrified that a company could
be so reckless and that the government had no power
to stop them.
Speaker 1: And before this, construction was basically the wild West.
Speaker 2: Architects didn't even have to sign their drawings. An engineer
wasn't necessarily held legally responsible if their bridge collapsed. There
were no mandated minimum standards for things like this.
Speaker 1: And the molasses flood changed all of that.
Speaker 2: It forced the government's hand. Yeah, the city of Boston
acted first. They passed new regulations requiring that architects and
engineers had to formally sign and seal their building plans.
They had to put their professional license on the line,
a testing that the design was safe.
Speaker 1: Which completely shifts the accountability. It's not just some faceless
corporation anymore. It's an individual professional who's on the hook.
Speaker 2: And that idea spread like wildfire. A wave of building
codes and regulations swept across the country. The very idea
that a plumber needs to be certified, That an inspector
has to sign off on wiring before you put up drywall.
That an engineer's calculations for a skyscraper have to be
reviewed and approved. All of that stems directly from the
lessons learned from this disaster.
Speaker 1: It's just incredible to think about. We live inside this
invisible web of safety regulations every single day, and we
just take it for granted. And it all started because
a company was in a rush to make rum a
poorly built tank, a tragic accident, and out of it
comes the foundation for modern American safety standards.
Speaker 2: And the ultimate irony, which we touched on, is still
the most powerful part of the story. The residents of
the North End were ignored, They were seen as powerless,
and yet they're horrible suffering created this protective legal structure
that now shields every single person in this country, whether
they're rich or poor, a citizen or not.
Speaker 1: It took this truly horrifying disaster, this freakish event caused
by greed, to force the government to protect the public
in a way that politics alone just couldn't achieve at
the time.
Speaker 2: Right, we rely on these hidden rules, but we forget
the human price that was paid to create them, which
I think leads us to the final question we want
to leave you with. We have all these codes and
regulations now, but you still hear stories about shortcuts, about
warnings being ignored for the sake of profit. So do
you think we've truly learned the lesson? Do we pay
enough attention to the quiet groans and the small leagues
today or does history just keep telling us that, unfortunately,
tragedy is always the fastest path to meaningful safety reform.
Speaker 1: We'd love to know what you think. Is it the
sheer absurdity of the disaster that sticks with you or
the incredible legal legacy left behind. Let us know we'll
be back next time with another thrilling thread.