Molasses Misfortune

 It would be a bad way to go.  It is the 15th day of January in the year 1919 and you have just picked up a copy of the Boston Globe newspaper to read the latest post-war news from Europe.  You will never read the Globe that day because you have suddenly joined 170 of your fellow Bostonians who have been swept away by a Tsunami of millions of gallons of fiery hot molasses syrup; enough to fill three and a half Olympic-size swimming pools.  Twenty of your fellow riders of the sweet surf will perish along with you in the disaster.

Molasses was a key ingredient for manufacturing munitions needed in the war effort America had waged in Europe. A plant in Boston had fashioned a steel tank into which the molasses was stored and a tanker from Puerto Rico had brought another 2.3 million gallons of the syrup that topped off the tank.  The problem was in the tank's construction.  From the start it had leaks and the engineering was faulty for containing the weight of the millions of gallons of molasses that were pumped into it.

Soon after the tanker deposited its load the tank split apart sending that Tsunami of syrup on its deadly flow, swallowing horses and people in its gravity-driven rush. Like the stench of the Boston Red Sox's deal almost a year later that sent Babe Ruth to the hated New York Yankees, the smell of molasses stayed in Boston's North End neighborhood for decades.