Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 15, 1994 TAG: 9401150044
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BOSTON LENGTH: Medium
Seventy-five years ago today, Albert Mostone scrambled to the top of Hull Street and watched as 2.3 million gallons of crude molasses erupted from a storage tank in a 30-foot-high brown wave.
The molasses tipped the firehouse, ripped homes from foundations and smothered buildings, pedestrians and teamsters' wagons.
"A piece of steel from the molasses tank hit the support for the elevated train and cut it almost in two," said Mostone, now 90. "It looked like butter. The people in the houses next door were eating their dinner, because it was a little after 12 o'clock, and they were drowned."
Few are still alive who remember the great molasses flood of 1919, which killed 21 people and injured 150. But for those who witnessed the tank's explosion, the memories still are vivid.
Jan. 15, 1919, was an unseasonably warm day. As the temperature rose to 43 degrees, the pressure of 27 million pounds of molasses weakened the poorly constructed Purity Distilling Co. tank, popping the bolts that held its steel panels together. Then the panels flew and the molasses surged out.
A three-story house across the street was thrown against the elevated train platform. The house's owner, Bridget Clougherty, died. Two of her children were injured.
Moments after the elevated tracks collapsed, a northbound train squealed around the bend. A brakeman saw the gap and threw the train into reverse just in time to avoid a derailment.
At the Public Works Department paving division next door, employees who had been eating lunch in the yard were smothered. And the teamsters who unloaded goods at the freight sheds of the Boston & Worcester and Eastern Massachusetts railroads suffocated alongside the horses that pulled their wagons.
Mostone, then 15 years old, watched for hours as police and firefighters cordoned off the area and tried to rescue those who were not completely submerged.
"The molasses was so high [the firefighters] couldn't walk through it," he said.
And the molasses, which had been kept liquid with warming pipes, quickly congealed. Water from fire hoses failed to move the sticky mass.
"They called the fire tugs in," Mostone said. "Salt water . . . moved the molasses very well."
By the second day, the stench of rotting horseflesh kept all but rescue workers at a distance. It was months before the North End was free of the last traces of molasses. Old-timers insist you can still smell molasses in houses whose basements were flooded.
"I never saw anything like that before . . . or since," said 84-year-old Ignazio Scagno, who was 9 at the time.
Purity's parent company, U.S. Industrial Alcohol, eventually paid more than $1 million to settle 125 lawsuits after court hearings determined the tank had not been built to withstand a full load.
by CNB