It sounded like a machine gun, then a roar, and then everything was brown.
Hi everybody, my name is Shauna and this is the American English Podcast.
My goal here is to teach you the English spoken in the United States.
Through common expressions, pronunciation tips and interesting cultural snippets or stories.
I hope to keep this fun, useful and interesting.
Let's do it.
Hi everybody, welcome back.
Today's episode is about one of the strangest and possibly one of the most tragic disasters in US history.
It doesn't involve earthquakes, tornadoes, or hurricanes.
Those are what we call natural disasters.
No, it involves molasses.
Talk about an unnatural disaster.
If you're not familiar with molasses, it's a thick, dark syrup that's produced during the process of refining sugar.
When you refine something, you purify it to make it usable.
So molasses is sticky, it's sweet, and somewhat bitter.
And usually we use it for making Christmas cookies and gingerbread.
I really like it.
It's nice.
It's not something that you'd expect to chase you down a city street.
That's for sure.
But on January 15th, 1919, in Boston, Massachusetts, in the North End, that's exactly what happened.
And today I'm going to walk you through the full story what led up to it, what happened and why this unusual event changed US law and safety standards.
So let's begin.
So let's talk about Boston.
Boston is one of those big popular cities in the United States and it's located in the northeastern part, north of New York City, north of DC.
It's in an area we call New England.
And we talked about it in episode 154.2 when we discussed the Boston Tea Party.
If you're interested in how the United States became the United States, then definitely tune into that one.
That's episode 154.2.
Flash forward over 100 years, and we're in 1919.
Now, this is just after World War I. The war ended in November 1918, and soldiers were coming home.
And Boston at the time was a busy industrial city.
And by that, I mean there was large-scale production there.
There were factories, manufacturing, shipping, of course, because of the famous harbor.
And the North End neighborhood of Boston, where our story takes place, was a working-class area filled with immigrants, especially Italian immigrants.
Just to visualize it, the buildings were close together, kids played outside and cars were not really common yet in this neighborhood.
The working class there had a lot of horses and carts.
You could say that it was lively and dense.
Dense meaning crowded or tightly packed.
And near the waterfront in that neighborhood, there was a giant steel storage tank.
It was huge.
It was about 50 feet tall roughly the height of a five-story building and about 90 feet wide, which is about the size of a basketball court.
And inside that tank, in that storage tank, there were 2.3 million gallons of molasses.
You might wonder, why was there so much molasses in that tank and in that area of Boston?
Now, at the time, molasses was used to produce industrial alcohol.
Industrial alcohol means alcohol, not for drinking, but for manufacturing.
So it could be used to make explosives, to make ammunition, to make fuel things that were needed during World War I.
So this wasn't a supply to make gingerbread houses.
It was part of a larger industrial operation.
And the company that owned the tank was the United States Industrial Alcohol Company.
But why so much molasses?
And why did molasses shipments from Puerto Rico and Cuba keep coming after the war?
Well, well, well, it's actually pretty interesting.
Many companies knew by 1919 that prohibition was coming.
There is strong historical evidence that companies were stockpiling molasses anticipating high demand.
With a supply, a company could legally produce industrial alcohol and illegally produce bootleg liquor.
Bootleg liquor refers to alcohol produced and sold illegally.
Illegally, for example, rum molasses can be fermented and distilled to make rum, so over time molasses would become more valuable.
So the more molasses, the better.
So let's talk about this tank.
The tank had been built quickly, in 1915.
And here's where things get concerning.
From the very beginning, it leaked.
Residents reported hearing strange noises, groaning and creaking.
Creaking is that high-pitched sound metal makes when it's under stress.
Or maybe your door makes if you don't have enough grease on the hinges.
Now molasses would seep out from the seams.
To seep means to slowly leak or pass through small openings.
So molasses would seep out of the seams.
And children in the neighborhood would actually bring cups and collect dripping molasses.
Now imagine that.
You're a kid.
You see free syrup leaking from a giant tank.
That sounds almost magical.
But in reality, it was a warning sign to the company.
Instead of properly fixing the leaks.
When residents complained, the company reportedly painted the tank brown.
Why?
So the leaks would be less noticeable.
They painted over the problem.
Now, this detail is very important to this story.
Let's go to January 15th, 1919.
It was a pretty cold winter day in Boston, around 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
Not quite freezing.
Now, the day before, a fresh shipment of molasses had been delivered to the tank.
Now, when you add new liquid to a container, you increase the pressure inside.
So the pressure inside the tank had increased.
Around 12.30 p.m., so right after lunch, people nearby heard a loud metallic crack.
Witnesses later said it sounded like a machine gun.
That sound came from rivets snapping.
Rivets are metal fasteners.
They're like heavy-duty bolts that hold steel plates together.
And the rivets were snapping.
One by one, they broke.
And then the tank exploded.
Suddenly, a massive wave of molasses rushed into the streets.
Some reporters said it was a tsunami of molasses.
According to Historycom, A 15-foot wall of syrup cascaded over Commercial Street at 35 miles per hour.
35 miles per hour!
Now, how much molasses exactly?
Well, 13,000 tons.
Now for a visual.
Imagine three full Olympic pools of molasses and then a third of another one, and all of that moving quickly and violently through the narrow streets.
Buildings were crushed.
Wagons flipped.
Horses were knocked over.
And people were swept off their feet.
Molasses isn't any liquid.
It's not pool water.
It's thick and heavy.
Now imagine trying to run through knee-deep mud, except stickier.
We can all agree at this point.
This was a very sticky situation, in both the literal and figurative sense.
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Now, what do you think happened to the molasses when it came in contact with the cold January air in Boston?
If you bake, I bet you can guess, as the molasses spread, it cooled.
And cooled molasses becomes denser and harder to move through.
One police officer named Frank McManus was able to make it to a call box.
According to the historian Stephen Pulio, McManus reported the incident to the dispatcher.
Quote, send all available rescue vehicles and personnel immediately.
There's a wave of molasses coming down Commercial Street.
Now, as I mentioned before, the North End was dense and busy, so there were police and fire stations close by.
The emergency responders were able to be at the scene quickly, but the thing is moving knee-deep through molasses was in no way quick.
Police officers firemen, members of the Red Cross and many others struggled to move through the syrupy streets.
And molasses coated everything.
The buildings, the clothing, the skin.
Some victims were trapped in place.
Others were injured by debris.
Debris means broken pieces of wood, metal, or building materials.
Some drowned.
In total, 21 people died and more than 150 were injured.
According to NBC News, it looked like the North End had been bombed.
Now, molasses has a very distinct smell.
And for days after the flood, the North End smelled strongly of molasses.
Decades later, some residents claimed that on hot summer days, they could still smell molasses rising from the pavement.
Wild.
Now, there's an expression in English that is slow as molasses.
It's a simile, right?
Slow as molasses.
That sloth is as slow as molasses.
We use it to describe when something moves very slowly.
So, for example, my grandpa...
I can totally imagine him having said, traffic was as slow as molasses this morning.
Or maybe if there's somebody working on their computer and it's taking forever for a web page to load, they could be like this thing is as slow as molasses.
Sounds kind of endearing, kind of funny.
Anyway, The process of cleaning up molasses was as slow as molasses.
So how did they clean this up?
Well, firefighters used salt water from the harbor to try to wash it away.
But water and sugar?
It became like glue.
It became incredibly sticky.
And the more they washed, the more it spread.
It actually took weeks to fully clean the area, and the harbor turned brown.
Shoes would stick to the sidewalks, and then people would track molasses around the city.
So it became a huge, huge mess.
That's probably the only place where we can allow a slight moment of irony.
Boston became... quite literally, stuck.
But for the families who lost loved ones, there was absolutely nothing funny about this.
They wanted justice.
The disaster led to one of the first major class action lawsuits in U.S. history.
A class action lawsuit was is when a large group of people sue a company together because they're harmed in a similar way.
So instead of you know 10 business owners and 50 people saying hey, you filled my shop with molasses or oh, my cousin drowned in molasses, they would come together and combine their cases into one.
And that's when it becomes a class action lawsuit.
And the thing is, it makes the legal process more efficient and more powerful.
Class action lawsuits gain recognition.
So in this case, more than 100 plaintiffs filed claims against the United States Industrial Alcohol Company.
So who is to blame for a disaster like this?
Most people in the neighborhoods, of course, blamed the company who owned the tank, the United States Industrial Alcohol Company.
They, on the other hand, suggested and this is very dramatic, but I'll give a little context that anarchists or Bolsheviks had planted a bomb next to the tank.
It seems sort of a wild thing to suggest.
But in 1919, the United States was entering what historians call the first Red Scare.
So that is to say that it wasn't unrealistic to make a statement like that at the time.
So the point is, who is to blame?
Was the company negligent in failing to take care of the tank?
The court ruled that they were negligent.
According to the MIT engineer Charles Spofford, the tank had not been constructed solidly from the beginning.
It was not designed to hold that much liquid.
The steel was too thin.
There were not enough rivets.
He concluded that the tank was holding almost twice its capacity.
And we also know the company failed to properly test and reinforce the tank when it was leaking.
In the end, they were ordered to pay damages to the victims and their families, which totaled about 628000 at the time, which is equivalent to many millions of dollars today.
So, perhaps more important than that money was the impact this event had on society.
After the trial, stricter building codes and safety inspections became more commonplace in the U.S.
Today, when engineers build massive tanks or skyscrapers, there are strict inspections.
Inspections are formal examinations to ensure safety.
Do you remember how we were doing renovations on our house last year?
Even in our simple house project, an inspector had to come over about five times to check things.
Is the electrical to code?
Does the structure of the new build follow the architect's plan?
Are the smoke detectors functioning?
And are they in the right places?
Why?
For safety reasons.
So today, companies can't simply paint over problems.
There's accountability.
All right, so this sounds like a very dramatic story.
It's fortunately very well documented because of the court case, because of the class action lawsuit and all of the witnesses.
So it's real, it's tragic and it's a very good instance where we can use the expression in a sticky situation.
When we use the expression in a sticky situation, we usually mean something awkward, like sending the wrong email or saying the wrong thing in public.
But in 1919, people in Boston were in a sticky situation in the most literal sense imaginable.
It's a very unnatural disaster that could have been prevented.
For some reason, people love telling stories about disasters.
And apparently they like listening to them too, including you guys.
My most listened to episode on this entire podcast was about Titanic.
What happened to the Titanic?
It hit an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the ocean.
That was episode number 164.2.
We spoke about catastrophic oil spills in episode 24.
But the reason I think it's important to Discuss disaster stories like these is because of the third conditional.
These present the most amazing situations in order to create statements.
For example, the Titanic.
Oops, we shouldn't have said the ship was unsinkable.
We should have put more life vests on the boat.
There should have been more lifeboats in general to take people off of the ship and get them to safety right.
If you would like to get a full lesson on the third conditional and the other bonus material for this episode, be sure to sign up to the Academy.
Once again, the Academy is designed to help you use English and start communicating effectively and naturally, so that you can connect with people when you're in the United States.
So, once again, you can find the link in the episode notes or on the website at AmericanEnglishPodcastcom.
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