Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Great Molasses Flood

Episode Date: November 1, 2020

On January 15, 1919, the city of Boston suffered its greatest disaster when a storage tank filled with over 2 million gallons of molasses burst and killed 21 people and injured 150 more. Researchers have been studying the unique circumstances surrounding this industrial accident ever since. Learn more about the Great Boston Molasses Flood on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On January 15, 1919, the city of Boston suffered its greatest disaster when a storage tank filled with over 2 million gallons of molasses, burst and killed 21 people and injured 150 more. Researchers have been studying the unique circumstances surrounding this industrial accident ever since. Learn more about the great Boston molasses flood on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says, that sex-trafficed children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals, but it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspirality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family,

and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. This episode is sponsored by CuriosityStream. If you're interested in learning more about great disasters that have affected humanity, Curiosity stream as programming which can help explain how these events happened. They have documentaries that cover topics such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, tsunamis, plagues, and pandemics. And they also, of course, have plenty of shows which cover the greatest human achievements as well. Prices start as low as $2.99 per month or $19.99 per year.

That's almost a whole year of programming for the cost of a month and a half on other streaming services. If you love to learn, then start your subscription by visiting everything-everywhere.com or by clicking on the link in the show notes. If you're familiar with molasses, you recognize it as an ingredient usually used in baking. It's a thick, sweet syrup, which if you pour it out of its container, will usually pour very slowly. Because it's so thick and has such a high viscosity, it seems like it would be easy to avoid a molasses flood by just walking away. If actual events weren't so tragic, the idea of a molasses flood would almost sound comical. To understand how the flood happened and why it was so deadly, we need to understand what the molasses was doing there and what it was used for.

Melasses is a byproduct of the refining of sugar. Since the very start of European colonization of the Americas, molasses was used as a principal source of sugar for the production of alcohol, in particular rum. Alcohol, and in particular ethanol, is also used in the creation of explosives. In 1919, the United States was coming off World War I, and the demand for industrial alcohol was at its high point. Also, the day after the flood, on January 16, 1919, was the day that the 18th Amendment was passed, which would have banned the sale of alcohol 12 months after its passage. The company had to make a whole lot of booze in the next year before they couldn't make it anymore. The purity distilling company was located in Boston and had a facility on the harbor where they could process incoming molasses

shipments, usually from Cuba. It was a subsidiary of the larger United States Industrial Alcohol Company. As part of their facility in 1915, they built a large 50-foot-tall storage tank for all the molasses which came in from ships. The tank dominated the local neighborhood, and it looked very similar to the large fuel storage tanks you might have seen in ports or near oil refineries. Not surprisingly, the construction of the storage tank was where the problem started. The tank was poorly designed and tested. For starters, the tank was designed and approved by a man named Arthur Jell, who was the treasurer for U.S. Industrial Alcohol. He wasn't an engineer and didn't even know how to read a blueprint. His primary concern was cost, not design or safety. The steel used in

the tank was not adequate for the task. A modern analysis of the tank determined that the steel was only half as thick as it should have been. The steel was also brittle due to a lack of manganese, and the rivets weren't installed properly. The tank was also never adequately tested. Before it was put into use, it was only filled a quarter of the way with water. Not only didn't they fill the entire tank, but they used water, which is much less dense than molasses. Almost immediately after being put into use, the tank began leaking. Molasses would seep through the rivet holes, and locals would go to the tank to collect free molasses. The company's solution was to paint the tank brown, so no one would notice the molasses leaks. In the aftermath of the

disaster. It was found that almost everyone who lived in the area expected the tank to fail at some point. Here I need to take a detour to explain a bit of the physics of fluids and specifically molasses. The first is to understand the concept of viscosity. Without getting too technical, viscosity is how easily a fluid can flow. Water has a very low viscosity and can flow very easily. Molasses and syrup have much higher viscosity and don't flow as easily. Temperature can change the viscosity of a substance. Usually the hotter a fluid is, the lower the viscosity, and this is going to become very important. The second thing is to understand Newtonian fluids. Water and motor oil are examples of Newtonian fluids, and it is what we are dealing with in our normal day-to-day

lives. Newtonian fluids do not change their viscosity, regardless of the amount of stress or pressure applied. Molasses is a non-neutonian fluid. It does change its viscosity based on the stress applied. And there are two types of these non-Newtonian fluids, sheer thickening or sheer thinning. There are some great videos you can find online which show how sheer thickening fluids work. If you mix cornstarch and water, you can create a fluid you can actually walk on. The pressure from your step causes the fluid to get briefly firm, allowing you to walk on it so long as you walk quickly and don't stop. Molasses is a sheer thinning fluid. That means under great pressure, it will actually become less viscous and flow more easily.

Melassas will also decrease its viscosity and flow more easily when it's heated. Both of these properties of molasses, its increased viscosity due to heat and due to pressure, would be critical to the events of January 15th. On the day of the tragedy, two things happened which helped influence events. First was that a ship arrived from Cuba and transferred over 600,000 gallons of molasses to the tank. The molasses was heated to make it less viscous, so it would be easier to transfer, and the amount transferred almost completely filled the tank to the top. It was one of the few times the tank had been completely filled since it was constructed.

The other thing which happened was that a warm front descended on Boston. The temperatures went from 2 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 17 degrees Celsius to 40 degrees Fahrenheit or 4 degrees Celsius in one day. It's believed the thermal expansion of the previously cold molasses due to the increase in the temperature and the addition of, of warm molasses from the ship, put enough pressure on the tank to cause it to fail catastrophically. There also may have been fermentation going on inside the tank, which would produce CO2, which would also create pressure. At 12.30 p.m., the tank burst. Because of the increased temperature of the molasses and the incredible pressure it was under in the full tank, the viscosity was quite low. When it burst out of the tank, it did so like water. It wasn't slowly pouring out like you would see molasses

come out of a bottle. Reports were that the wave of molasses was 25 feet or six meters high and traveled at 35 miles per hour down the street. The explosion of the tank burst with the energy of 850 sticks of dynamite. Rivets from the tank shot out like bullets and lodged in buildings. The tank couldn't have burst at a worse time. Children were walking home from school for lunch and workers were out on the street. Buildings and elevated railways were hit by the flood and collapsed. Once the molasses burst forth from the tank, the non-neutonian nature of the fluid began to kick in. Now that it was no longer under pressure and exposed to the outside air, the molasses viscosity increased and its flow slowed dramatically. Once people were caught in it, it became the thick syrup that most people are accustomed to, which made it very difficult to get out of.

The initial death toll was only 10 people. However, over the next several days and weeks, more bodies were found with the final body count reaching 21. The last bodies were found four months after the flood because they were swept out into the Boston Harbor. After the initial destruction in the immediate area surrounding the tank, the molasses kept flowing. Eventually, much of downtown Boston had one to two feet of molasses. The cleanup was extremely difficult. Molasses in January doesn't drain away. People from all over Boston in nearby cities came to the waterfront to help clean up and to take home free molasses. So many people came to the site of the flood that,

streetcars and other communities around Boston became sticky and smelled of molasses for weeks because of people tracking it back. Boston Harbor was stained with molasses until the summer, and many buildings had molasses stains that lasted for years. In the aftermath of the disaster, one of the largest and first class action lawsuits in American history was filed against the United States Industrial Alcohol Company. The trial lasted over three years and was the longest trial in Massachusetts history up to that point. There were so many lawyers involved that they they couldn't all fit in the courtroom. The company claimed that the tank was attacked by anarchists who were protesting the use of the molasses to make explosives.

There were actually two incidents similar to that, which happened during the war. However, the evidence of negligence was overwhelming, and the company was eventually found guilty and had to pay $628,000 in damages, or the modern equivalent of $9.3 million. Today, the Great Molasses Flood remains the second worst disaster in the history of Boston. Many of the buildings and structures in the area of the flood have long since been torn down and replaced. But given the nature of the molasses getting into every nook and cranny, there are still people who claim that on a warm summer's day, you can still smell molasses in Boston. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackala. Please remember to support the show over at patreon.com, where you can get exclusive merchandise and to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Leave a five-star review to have your review read online.

Thank you.