![]() ![]() ![]() Ronald Mayville, a senior principal at the engineering firm Simpson Gumpertz & Heger in Massachusetts, has studied the molasses flood in his spare time. "The tank starts leaking on Day 1," Puleo said. Instead of filling the entire tank with water after it was finished to test for leaks, he only put in six inches of water. People were trapped, with witnesses described trying to breathe while stuck, gasping for their lives and simultaneously trying to avoid inhaling too much.įrom the beginning, Jell sidestepped safety precautions. ![]() As molasses flooded the streets, it slowed but became thicker and stickier, and still difficult to escape. Many survivors had broken backs and fractured skulls.ĭuring the second stage of the flood, "the inertia runs out as the molasses spreads - that's when viscosity starts to matter," Sharp said, referring to a liquid's resistance to flow. People's bones were crushed, their bodies thrown onto buildings and train cars. "When the initial wave came through, it just pulverized everything," Sharp said. When the tank broke and the molasses exploded, there was no outrunning it. The inertia is so much more powerful than the forces that can be moved by the viscosity." "The fact that the molasses is extremely viscous doesn't matter for the first 60-90 seconds. When the tank ruptured, all that potential energy became kinetic energy. The tank, piled so high with molasses, stored a large amount of potential energy. "Molasses is 1.5 times heavier than water. Sharp said the flood could be broken down into two stages, with the first called "The Tsunami." "I found that the initial wave could have moved at that speed," she said. "Modern day distillers store molasses in small totes of about 275 gallons each, or in stainless steel tanks at larger volumes," he says via email.Sharp decided to look into the science behind the flood, along with a team of scientists at Harvard. Jesse Brenneman, co-founder of the Deacon Giles Distillery in Massachusetts explains why a flood of this nature wouldn't even be possible today. Since the tank wasn't a building or a bridge, there was no regulatory agency responsible for inspecting or regulating it. "The tanks actually broke, because at the time they were made of steel that was too thin, reportedly below standards, even for the time, and the sheer weight of over 2 million gallons of molasses was far too much to bear, eventually causing the tank to fatigue and break, spilling ungodly amounts of molasses out of the warehouse and into the streets." "It's a common misconception that the tanks exploded," says Jamie Windon, owner and co-founder of Lyon Distilling in Maryland, via email. With little in the way of regulation at the time, the Purity Distilling Company tossed together its molasses tank without the benefit of anyone qualified to design so massive a tank. But the reason for the tank's explosion was much more insidious: reckless craftsmanship. 16 edition of "The Boston Globe" suggested that an internal explosion could have been the culprit. Initial reports suggested that anarchists might have blown the massive tank owned by the Purity Distilling Company. ![]() 15, 1919, just a year before Prohibition would go into effect, the tank ruptured. Just before the disaster, the tank had been filled close to capacity with a recent shipment of molasses. Later investigation found that the tank wasn't structurally sound to begin with - in fact, it had even been quickly painted brown to hide the fact that it leaked molasses constantly. In 1915 they had erected a massive steel tank, 52 feet (15.9 meters) tall, 90 feet (27.4 meters) across, and able to hold 2.5 million gallons (9.5 million liters) of molasses, which was a prime ingredient for their enterprise. The Purity Distilling Company was a manufacturer of rum and industrial alcohol in Boston's North End. ![]()
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