Culture
Anniversary of the Day: Boston's Great Molasses Flood of 1919
One of the weirdest and most awful things that ever happened.
Ninety-four years ago today, a giant molasses tank in Boston exploded, sending a flood of molasses through the streets near Keany Square. Twenty-one people were killed and dozens more injured. Dead horses, dogs and cats had to be hauled away by the cartload. The flow was so strong that a railroad car was pushed off the tracks.
As Boston Magazine writer Eric Randall (formerly of The Atlantic Wire) observes, the more you know about the Molasses Flood, the more rapidly it moves from "amusingly quirky," to "genuinely horrifying." He digs up a 1983 Smithsonian commemoration that reveals the Wave would have been traveling at 35 miles per hour: