A Sticky Mess
Boston, Massachusetts. A town renowned for its role in American history. Many pivotal events happened here: the "No Taxation Without Representation" movement, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Marathon Bombing. But there is one strange event in peculiar, one that just so happened celebrated its 100th anniversary early this year in January, that shook many normal Bostonians and Americans alike. It was the Great Boston Molasses Flood.
On January 15, 1919, at around 12:30 pm, many Bostonians were disrupted from their normal afternoon by a huge wave of molasses rolling down the street. Panic ensued as people tried to escape the path of the sugary substance. Unfortunately for them, escape was no easy task. With a height of 25 feet (8 m), a width of 160 feet (49 m), and a speed of 35 mph (56 km/h), the 2.3 million gallons of molasses was escapable. Within seconds, two blocks in Boston were flooded, leaving the area looking like the shell of a bombing. People who failed to evade the waves path were immediately swallowed, drowned and asphyxiated by the notoriously viscous substance. In the end, 21 people died and 150 people were injured.
But the question is: how did this happen? It's simple: cheapness and rushed construction. The molasses that caused all the disastrous chaos had been contained in a poorly made steel tank. The tank's walls were too thin and made of a steel that was too brittle to withstand the volume of molasses in it. This was the result of the company using the tank cutting corners to get the tank built as fast as possible. They hired an illiterate man who couldn't read the blueprint and wasn't an engineer or architect to oversee the construction. Then the company made the mistake of pouring warm molasses into the tank when there was still cold molasses in it. This triggered a fermentation process that produced gas, which slowly accumulated in the tank until it caused the tank to explode.
What happened next was history. To this day, people still remember that horrifically sticky day, with a small plaque in the area of the flooded area commemorating the strange tragedy.