Death by Molasses: the Great Boston Flood of 1919 and Disaster a City Chose to Forget

It sounds like a joke. It killed twenty-one people. Just after noon on an unseasonably warm day in January 1919, a storage tank the height of a five-storey building burst on Boston's crowded waterfront and loosed 2.3 million gallons of molasses across the North End. The wave stood twenty-five feet high and moved at thirty-five miles an hour. It flung a firehouse toward the harbour, buckled the elevated railway, and swallowed a working immigrant neighbourhood as it sat down to lunch. The dead were crushed against buildings or drowned where they stood. Some hundred and fifty more were injured. And then the corporation that had built the tank blamed anarchists. Death by Molasses is the true story of America's strangest disaster and the reckoning that followed: the cut corners that raised a lethal tank over people's homes, the immigrant families who were never asked whether it belonged over theirs, and the six-year legal fight that forced one of the country's largest companies to answer for what it had done. History remembers the Great Molasses Flood as a punchline. It was a catastrophe, and the people it killed deserved better than a laugh.