On the afternoon of January 19th, 1919, the people of Boston, Massachusetts, heard a loud explosion, and then a dark mass of liquid over 20 feet high tore through the city. The dark gooey substance that had flooded the city was not water but molasses.
The city would spend months cleaning up, and for years afterward, the worst-hit neighborhood smelled of molasses on hot summer days. Some cities are destroyed by hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes, heavy flooding from storms, or even fire. But only one city has been partially destroyed by a flood of molasses. This was most definitely an unnatural disaster but one that is still remembered in Boston to this day.
How Come Molasses Flooded Boston?
In the North End neighborhood, there was a distilling company that specialized in producing ethanol and other products such as molasses. Molasses was a bigger deal back in 1919 than it is today. It is a viscous liquid made of refined sugar that was used in many products including brown sugar and rum. Pure molasses is a very thick and sticky substance that can be a pain in the butt to clean off of your fingers let alone clean up from whole city blocks.
Boston is known as a city with freezing cold winters, but for a few days in January 1919, it was quite warm, so people were out and about enjoying the bearable winter weather. However, the unseasonably warm weather may be what triggered a disaster never before seen.
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A 50 ft. high storage tank, with 2.3 million gallons of molasses weighing 13,000 tons, exploded. The force of the explosion shook the city, and the residents scrambled to see what had happened or what type of danger they were in.
Bostonites soon got their answer; it was something that nobody could have ever imagined. A gooey wall of molasses over 20 feet high went through the streets traveling up to 35 mph. The tsunami of molasses destroyed buildings and even tore down the elevated subway tracks.
People who couldn’t get out of the way or get to high ground were absorbed into the liquid where they drowned. The mass of molasses was so strong that whole buildings were taken off of their foundations and destroyed. Even the most skilled swimmer could not get out of the sticky mess once it engulfed someone.
As the molasses spread throughout the city, it ended up covering the streets of Boston with 2-3 ft. of sticky and slowly hardening molasses. The molasses moved through the city destroying anything in its path as if it were lava, though a very sugary and sticky lava.
The Aftermath of the Great Molasses Flood
In the immediate aftermath of the flooding, 21 people were dead, and over 150 were seriously injured. People from all over Boston rushed to the molasses-covered area of the city to help recover survivors and begin cleaning up. First responders were hindered by the sticky substance that slowed them down and made moving through the molasses difficult, so getting to survivors was an ordeal.
Nobody had ever had to clean up so much molasses before, and Bostonites soon realized that it was very hard to get rid of. The city decided to use salt water from the harbor to make the molasses thinner and easier to push toward the harbor.
For months Boston Harbor was dark brown. Molasses, besides being gooey, is also soluble, so it mixes well with water, which meant that the harbor was full of molasses until the end of the summer. For months, hundreds of workers cleaned as best as they could, but it seemed that the whole city of Boston was sticky from molasses being everywhere.
The city of Boston was eager to celebrate the end of WWI, which ended in November 1918, and begin 1919 in peace. Before the end of the month though, Bostonites would be dealing with a catastrophe that is surely one of the strangest floods to have ever happened.
