I Heart the Internets!
October 30, 2007 8 Comments
OK. Why has no one told be about this?
There I was, looking for a slow cooker (crock pot) recipe for Boston Baked Beans, and the first page I looked at talked about the Great Molasses Flood that swept through part of Boston, Massachusetts on January 15, 1919.
Well, when I had stopped laughing, I thought Oh, surely not. But yes, There really was such an event. And I felt really bad about the laughing, when I realised just what had been involved.
Imagine, there you are, going about your daily business in the Molasses Capital of the Western World (due to slavery and sugar and rum and location) when you hear a boom, then a sound like machine guns firing, then a swoosh and a tide of molasses 15ft high travelling at 35 mph sweeps down the road towards you. No running from this molasses, no sir! 150 people injured, 21 dead, and uncounted numbers of horses and other animals, glazed to death in a sea of stickiness.
A tank containing an estimated 2.5 million gallons of molasses – and that is one hell of a lot of sweet sticky stuff – burst. Probably due to the temperature rising quite steeply on that day. The company blamed Italian anarchists, and claimed the tank had been blown up. Sabotage! But they lied (now there's a surprise!) and were fined $1,000,00 for lack of care.
It took weeks months to clear up.
And I only found out because I wanted to make some nice Beans. The internets is, indeed, a truly wondrous place.
Here is the Snopes page about it.
The map shows the area of the disaster.
Now, if only I could find a place to download Intruder by Peter Gabriel, my life would be – not complete, but happier!
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