Death by Molasses: The Great Boston Flood of 1919 and the 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 ele...