More than 100 lawsuits were filed against the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, the owner of Purity Distilling, whose lawyers tried, perhaps cynically, to blame Italian anarchists for the disaster, claiming that radicals had bombed the tank. Flaminio Gallerani’s body was discovered 11 days after the spill, while the body of Cesare Nicolo, a wagon driver, wouldn’t be found for another four months, pulled from the water under Commercial Wharf. The rescue effort was painstaking and protracted. It was a hideous scene, and when the temperature plunged overnight, the dead became entombed in the hardened sugar, forcing frantic workers to use saws and chisels to clear wreckage and retrieve bodies. Others were horribly injured - fractured skulls and broken backs - and 25 horses were killed.”

“Think of it,” says Puleo, the author of Dark Tide. Moving at a rate of 50 feet per second, the rising tide leveled buildings and buckled the steel girders of the elevated railway, overwhelming everything and everyone in its wake, including 10-year-old Pasquale Iantosca, who was struck and killed by a train car swept from the tracks. Just after noon on January 15, 1919, with the sun high in the sky and temperatures topping 40 degrees, the tank failed spectacularly, coming apart like a wet paper bag and sending a wall of molasses roaring through the neighborhood. Residents and passersby also reported hearing a peculiar groaning sound coming from the mammoth cauldron long before it erupted. But instead of inspecting the tank, the owners merely painted it brown to disguise the leaks. Street urchins greedily scraped up the gunk, using sticks to make primitive lollipops. Indeed, signs of trouble appeared almost immediately in the form of dark, pearly streaks of molasses that ran down the sides of the monstrous tank. In 1915, the Purity Distilling Company had built a holding tank some 50-feet tall on Commercial Street, choosing the location for its proximity to Boston Harbor - molasses arrived from Puerto Rico and points south - and to the nearby railroad tracks that shuttled the sugary ooze to the manufacturing plant in Cambridge.īut in its haste to construct the tank - in a precinct populated, not coincidentally, by poor Italian immigrants powerless to prevent such a thing from being shoehorned into their neighborhood - the company’s profit-hungry bosses dispensed with tests that would have revealed the structure’s lethal flaws. The gooey byproduct of refined sugarcane was much in demand during World War I because it could be converted to industrial alcohol, a critical ingredient in the manufacture of munitions. “The fact that it tends to be turned into a ha-ha story does an incredible disservice to the people who lost their lives.”Īnd yet, we’re talking about molasses, the otherwise innocuous treacle used to give batters and gingerbread a brown cast and a quality chew. “It was an awful thing that happened,” Weaver says.

Great boston molasses flood plaque