Hot Molasses

Transcription

The Purity Distilling Company head built a molasses tank in the North End in 1915, hastily constructed, their main plant to turn the molasses-they actually were turning the molasses into ammunition-was in Cambridge. So they would pipe the molasses from this tank over to Cambridge, hastily constructing this in 1915 just as World War I was beginning. Molasses has lots of uses, probably the most common would be to make sugar or to make rum, but this molasses from the Purity Distilling Company was being broken down into into its chemical components which then would be used to manufacture explosives. And explosives were quite in demand in the nineteen teens as the whole world is at war. So, the Purity Distilling Company is using this particular molasses to create explosives, through a chemical process about which I am not qualified to speak. People notice that there are problems with this molasses tank, that is the molasses was leaking and neighbors complained. You're in a crowded neighborhood in the North End, and some neighbors enjoyed going over to the tank and scooping up the molasses that was leaking from the rivets, and they could tell it was leaking because of the brown streams running down the side, and the company responded by painting the tank brown so no one would see that it was leaking. January 15, 1919, they've just filled the tank with warm molasses from Cuba and that molasses interact with the cold molasses in the tank, the temperature had been very cold, on January 15th the temperature warms up and at about noon the tank explodes. People remembered what sounded like machine-gun fire as the rivets were popping off of this tank and the plates, the steel plates holding the molasses in exploded and destroyed the elevated train line running along Commercial Street, also destroyed fire the fire boat station. And this flood of molasses killed 21 people, injured hundreds of horses is who actually had to be shot because they couldn't be gotten out of the molasses. This is a disaster. Initially the company tried to blame anarchists who had been sending letter bombs, but the real cause was fermentation in the tank and the faulty construction. There were no regulations on what could be built, and in fact the company had built the tank saying that it wasn't really a structure that needed to be regulated or inspected. And what happened in the wake of this? Already in the North End community there was a gas generating plant, actually just across the street, where you had coal being turned into gas. Whose inspecting that tank? Is it really safe to have a tank natural gas in the middle of a densely populated neighborhood, and you can't really make the argument of what could possibly happen to a tank of gas when you've just had a tank of molasses exploding and in killing 21 people. So it is thanks to this destruction of the molasses tank and the mayhem it caused that Boston requires the inspection of natural gas tanks, and in fact began moving gas tanks out of the densely populated urban areas. The North End, of course, at this time was a heavily Italian neighborhood and the Italian community did not want to have the molasses tank there, this gives them a certain political impetus to organize and to prevent the city from locating health menaces like molasses tanks or gas tanks in the heart of their neighborhood.