The syrup moved quickly enough to cover several blocks within seconds and thickened into a harder goo as it cooled, slowing down the wave but also hindering rescue efforts. They concluded that when a shipment of molasses newly arrived from the Caribbean met the cold winter air of Massachusetts, the conditions were ripe for a calamity to descend upon the city.īy studying the effects of cold weather on molasses, the researchers determined that the disaster was more fatal in the winter than it would have been during a warmer season. Despite the idiom slow as molasses, a 25-foot-high and 165-foot-wide wave of molasses crashed through the neighborhood at a. The wave of syrup - some reports said it was up to 40 feet tall - rushed through the waterfront, destroying buildings, overturning vehicles and pushing a firehouse off its foundation.įor nearly 100 years, no one really knew why the spill was so deadly.īut at a meeting of the American Physical Society this month, a team of scientists and students presented what may be an important piece of the century-old puzzle. On one fateful day in January 1919, in Boston’s North End, a molasses-filled giant tank, measuring 50 feet in height and 90 feet in diameter, ruptured and caused a tsunami of 2.3 million gallons of thick syrup. And when 2.3 million gallons of molasses burst from a gigantic holding tank in the city’s North End, 21 people were killed and about 150 more were left injured. The street was strewn with debris intermixed with molasses and all traffic was stopped.” “Wagons, carts, and motor trucks were overturned. The Great Molasses Flood of 1919, Bostons version of Pompeii, surely ranks as one of the citys worst disasters - and its hard to think of a ghastlier one. “Two million gallons of molasses rushed over the streets and converted into a sticky mass the wreckage of several small buildings which had been smashed by the force of the explosion.” “A dull muffled roar gave but an instant’s warning before the top of the tank was blown into the air,” The New York Times wrote in 1919.
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