Treacle Tears: The Boston Molasses Disaster

What makes these stories so appealing? We'll aim to answer that and any other hoax based question you send in just email Tales at Pushkin dot fm by the thirtieth of June. Boston, January nineteen nineteen. Giuseppe Yantoska stands at his kitchen window searching for his ten year old son. All sorts of people come and go in Boston's North End, and Giuseppe likes to keep a close eye on little Pasquale or Pasqualino, as he's affectionately known at home. Giuseppe

doesn't speak much English like many of their neighbors. The Antoscas hail from southern Italy. They're very poor. Even with Giuseppe's shifts at the Boston and Maine Railroad backbreaking work laying track, they struggle to make ends meet. Fresh milk and meat are rare. It is in the Antosca house and Giuseppe and his wife Maria worry about their six small children. Where is Pasqualino. Giuseppe surveys Commercial Street, a

thoroughfare beneath his window that curves along the water. It's an unusually fine day from mid January, and the harbor is bustling. Fishermen hurry to their lunch, a plate of spaghetti at home, power as a pie from Partial's bakery. Dock workers shout as they unload shipping crates and horse drawn wagons hauling beer barrels mingle with peddler's carts. Motorized trucks rattle to and from the factories that ring the north end. Giuseppe scans the elevated railroad that swoops above

Commercial Street and the freight trains directly beneath it. Finally, he traces the hulking storage tank that dominates the wharf. His eyes flick to a tiny figure clad in red and crouching in the shadow of the high steel walls. Pasqualino Giuseppe breathes a sigh of relief. Down on the wharf, pasquale A Tosca and his friends Tony and Maria Destacio are huddling beside the enormous storage tank fifty feet high and ninety feet wide. Its grumbles and shudders and its sweet,

earthy scent are familiar to them. The tank isn't designed to store diesel or grain, but of all things, a thick, dark, sugary liquid and glasses. It pools around the base of the tank, and the children like to play there, dodging stern railroad workers to scoop the sticky liquid into their pails and hurrying home with their syrupy treasure. But today Pasqualino doesn't feel like playing. He knows his father's watching him.

He's also very hot beneath his bright red knitwear. It's the second sweater his mother insisted he wear that morning. She fears him catching a cold. But the day's mild, and the extra bolk also slows him down. As he gathers firewood, the tank groans, which isn't unusual. A fresh load of the sugary substance has recently arrived from the Caribbean. Pasqualino looks up at the massive container fifty foot streams of my glasses seep down its side in long, treakily tears.

I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. Arthur P. Gell had his work cut out. It was late nineteen fourteen and had been tasked with building an enormous malasses contained near Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gell was assistant treasurer at the Purity Distilling Company, part of United States Industrial Alcohol or USIA. USIA processed molasses into alcohol for munitions like dynamite and smokeless powder, so when Europe went to war in nineteen fourteen,

the company had begun boosting production. Its plant in Cambridge was one of the largest in the country, but USIA struggled to keep up with demand. It didn't have its own storage facility, so it had to source its molasses from a broker in South Boston rather than directly from

the Caribbean. This, in turn, eight into profits. To truly make hay while the sun shone, USIA needed its own tank, one that would be up and running by December thirty, first nineteen teen fifteen, and it was decided that reliable, efficient Arthur Jell was the man for the job. The deadline was virtually impossible, but Gell's bosses had hinted that if he succeeded, a New York City promotion was on the cards. He was determined to give it his best shot.

As Stephen Pulio explains in his book Dark Tide, Gell had spent his professional life in a range of clerical positions. An experienced administrator, he was confident that he knew the right people. He consulted other tank manufacturers about the appropriate factor of safety for a container like this one, and ordered steel plates to form the sides of the cylindrical structure. He also negotiated a lease for the perfect spot in

Boston's North End. Here steamships from the Caribbean could discharge the molasses, and the sugary substance could then travel on to the Cambridge plant by railcar. Sure, the area was densely populated, and there was a children's playground right next to the proposed tank site, but Jell knew that the residents of the North End were unlikely to resist the structure. Many of them were poor immigrants from Italy's south. They didn't speak English and kept to their own tight enclave.

Their political participation was scant. All the same, lease negotiations were slow. By the time Gell had secured the location, it was September nineteen fifteen and the clock was ticking. Ever resourceful, he installed electric lighting at the wharf so that the construction crew could work through the night. But when a laborer fell inside the empty tank, lost more time, so traumatized with the other workers by the dying man's screams. Then a superstorm blasted Boston and he lost a further

two days. Gel couldn't afford any more embarrassing setbacks or expenses. When the time came to test the tank for leaks, he knew that they could only fill the massive structure by tapping into the municipal water supply. This would be time consuming and costly, so he came up with a solution. The crew ran six inches of water into the bottom of the container to just above the first joint at its base. If the first joint didn't leak, right with the rest of them, the tank held its six inches

of water and Gel announced that it was ready. It was late December nineteen fifteen, he had met his impossible deadline. Business boomed. From nineteen fourteen to nineteen sixteen, USIA's net profit increased nearly ninefold. The investors were thrilled. In April nineteen seventeen, the US declared war on Germany, and Gell was ready to show the managers in New York that Boston could rise to the challenge. That month, a munitions factory in Pennsylvania was bombed, the work of foreign employees

who were angry about the war. Italian anarchists were said to be behind other similar bombings. Jell took note and increased security at the Boston Tank. A couple of weeks later, Gell ran into another complication. A man called Isaac Gonzales burst into his Cambridge office uninvited and unapproved. Gonzales was also a USIA employee, the assistant to the caretaker at the Boston Tank, and he was raving about some leaks in the structure. Apparently the tank oozed gallons of molasses

onto the wharf. Everyone had noticed, and children even liked to play with it. Gonzales shoved tiny pieces of steel into Jell's hands and said that rusty flex dropped into his hair each time he entered the tank. Gell did his best to keep calm. This man was clearly paranoid. Even obsessed molasses had a life of its own, and leaks were normal, especially in a relatively new structure, and especially after a fresh shipment. Plus, Jel had had the

tank resealed, so he knew it was being maintained. He told Gonzales that he needed to do a better job of keeping the neighborhood children away from company property. That would shut him up. He thought it didn't shut him up. Next, Gonzales revealed he had been sleeping at the tank so that he could sound the alarm should it start to fall. Jell was disturbed. Company employees should be returning home after work. The tank still stands. The tank will stand, he snapped.

Then he sent the man on his way, promising to fire him if he breathed another word of this nonsense. Yes, Arthur Jell was a reliable, efficient man. Nothing would hinder productivity on his watch, not saboteurs with bombs, and certainly not some jumped up manual laborer. Isaac Gonzales returned to his post through nineteen seventeen and nineteen eighteen, other Bostonians

muttered to him about the tank. The men of Engine thirty one fire house, which stood just along the wharf, commented on the obvious leaks that streaked its sides and the strange sounds it made. When another local worker pressed his back against the tank, he told Isaac it felt as though the steel walls were moving, pulsing in and out with the flow of the liquid inside. Gonzales continued

his nighttime vigil in secret. Of course, he knew he couldn't speak to jail again, but in nineteen eighteen he complained to his superintendent, William White, he waited to see if his bosses would do anything. They did. In August, a crew arrived at the tank paint in Gel had ordered them to adore the gray steel walls with a dark red brown, the color of molasses. Gonzales had had enough. He quit his job and joined the army. Cautionary tales

will return. Usia had done well out of the war in Europe, but when the armistice was signed in November nineteen eighteen, it faced a steep fall in profits. Assistant Treasurer Arthur jell knew all too well that the investors wouldn't be happy, but all was not lost. As the United States looked to ratify the eighteenth Amendment of the Constitution,

Usia spotted a slim window of opportunity. The prohibition of the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors wouldn't actually go into effect for another year, during which time there would surely be a spike in alcohol sales. Usia resolved to repurpose its distilleries for the liquor industry. It would once again make hay while the sun shone. On January the twelfth, nineteen nineteen, a ship cruised into Boston Harbor

with one point three million gallons of molasses. The dark, viscous liquid had been warmed to facilitate its transfer, and it flowed easily into the tank. By next morning, the container was very nearly full. It held two point bis three million gallons of the sticky substance, weighing roughly twenty six million pounds. The weather in Boston had been bitterly cold, and when the warm, free flowing molasses topped up the colder,

thicker liquid already in the tank, something unexpected happened. The introduction of all that additional heat accelerated a fermentation process producing carbon dioxide. The gas had nowhere to go, and it began to push against the steel walls of the tank. USIA's only responsibility, as the company saw it, was to maximize profit. Somehow, that always seemed to mean profit now rather than profit later, and so Arthur Gel prioritized speed,

growth and quarterly returns. If that sounds familiar, it could be because Silicon Valley has become famous or infamous for a similar corporate logic. Facebook's motto was move fast and Break things, and it became the tech world's battle cry. A move fast and break things culture can encourage innovation and banish fear of mistakes. After all, errors are path

of the course, especially when you're making something new. And while slow and steady can bring small, consistent benefits to a business, throwing caution to the wind might generate a single massive payoff. But when a corporation values efficiency and growth above all else, there can be other consequences environmental costs, community welfare, and work. Because rights fall by the wayside, safeguards are eroded, accountability dissolves, and harm is written off

as a cost of doing business. January fifteenth, nineteen nineteen is a cloudy day in Boston, but unusually mild. The weather has been punishingly cold of late, and the people of the North End take advantage of the slight thaw At lunchtime. The harbor is a buzz Workers eat their lunch on front steps and chatter on sidewalks. The mood is a mellow tank. Superintendent William White has just received a phone call from his wife. She has her eye

on new dress and wants to go shopping together. It'll be a quiet workday now that the new load of molasses has been safely delivered, and White sees no not to spoil her. Just before midday, he leaves his post. If he had lingered, he might have noticed Pasquale and Tosca and the Dastacio children sneaking onto the wall to collect firewood. Instead. A railroad worker begins scolding Maria d'astasio. You shouldn't be here, he chides, this isn't a playground.

Just along the wharf, the men of the Engine thirty one Firehouse are playing whist on their lunch break, smoking their pipes and mocking bay Ruth's ridiculous demands for a pay rise. The baseball star would never survive on a firefighter's wage, They scoff. Fifty six year old John Barry, a stonecutter for the City of Boston Street Department, has

joined them from his workshop next door. Burly and muscular, Barry is physically formidable, but his friends at the firehouse know that his ten children are never far from his thoughts. What was that It sounded like thunder? One of the firefighters scrambles to a window. His face darkens with fear. Oh my god, he cries. Run at his kitchen window. Giuseppe yan Tosca jumps back in horror. He's been following his Pasqualino as he gathers firewood, tracing that bright red

sweater as it bobs along the gray wharf. But something has just swallowed the little boy. A kind of dark, gleaming wave pushing forwards, tearing towards Commercial Street. The kitchen growls and shakes, and before he can move, Giuseppe has been thrown to the floor. He hits his head, everything goes back. At a call box on Commercial Street, policeman Frank McManus is making a routine report to headquarters that chilling sound somewhere between a thunderclap and sickening scrape of

metal makes him turn receiver still to his mouth. He can't quite believe what he's seeing, but he manages to utter a few shocked words to the dispatcher. Send all available rescue vehicles and personnel immediately. There's a wave of molasses coming down Commercial Street. What follows is the stuff of nightmares. The tank has burst clean open rid, its screaming through the air like shrapnels. The worker trapped in the railroad freight office saw the tank's steel walls fly

into other buildings, which crumpled like egg. Two point three million gallons of molasses has rushed onto the wharf, a syrupite tsunami, thirty five feet high, one hundred and sixty feet wide, and traveling at thirty five miles per hour. It snuffs out the daylight and wrenches the fire house from its foundations on Commercial Street. In the dining room of his second floor apartment, Robert Burnett, he is a swish, like a brushing of wind. A shadow falls across the room,

and he hurries to the window. A great black wave is bearing down on the house. Burnett snatches at his front door that the wave is already surging up the stairs in the hallway. He slams the door and runs for the roof. The wall of molasses rebounds off buildings, shattering windows and pulverizing brickwork. It twists and snaps the steel girders of an elevated railroad, obliterating the track for

more than one hundred feet. Horses, carts, and motor trucks are overturned, Children and adults vanish in a treatily deluge. Stonecutter John Barry lies in total darkness, wood and metal crushing his back its agony. He can barely breathe. When the wave of molasses ripped the firehouse off its foundations, the building collapse and the treacherous syrup seeped through the debris. Barry is trapped, pinned, face down, one cheek grinding into molasses. Only his left arm is free, and he clears the

vile liquid from his face as best he can. Barry tries to call out to scream, but his voice is thin and reading. He imagines foul rats scuttling over his body, burrowing their yellow teeth into his flesh. I'm going to die here, he thinks. He wonders what will become of his ten children. On his kitchen floor, Giuseppe and Tosca comes too. His wife Maria is crying in the corner

of the room. One of their daughters is comforting her bruised. Stunned, Giuseppe pulls himself up and goes shakily to the door. He will find Pasqualino. If it kills him. Cautionary tails would be back shortly. In the first moments of the disaster, the molasses flowed through the streets of Boston like water, or perhaps like ketchup being jiggled out of a bottle. Like ketchup, molasses flows freely when being violently shaken and exploding out of a high pressure tank is certainly a

violent movement, but when malasses cools, it thickens. On January the fifteenth, the temperature in Boston had climbed a little, but the winter air was still much cooler than the syrupy liquid, and as it flowed out of the tank and through the streets, it began to slow and congeal like quicksand it tracked its victims. As the Boston Post explained, snared in its flood was to be stifled Once it smeared ahead human or animal, there was no coughing off

the sticky mass. To attempt to wipe it with hands was to make it worse. It plugged the nostrils almost air tight. Horses thrashed around in the glooy mass like so many flies on sticky flypaper. They couldn't be freed and were shot dead. At a local relief station, nurses and orderlies streaked with molasses treated the injured. They carried patients on sticky stretchers, cutaway clothing, and cleaned gaping wounds. Anguished Bostonians clamored to know if their missing relatives were there.

A lucky few were relatively unscathed. Five year old Albert Janshi had been picked up by the wave and drenched in molasses, but was miraculously unhurt. Once he had been cleaned up and had something to eat, he was allowed to return home. Others were taken straight to the local morgue. In the ruins of the firehouse, John Barry's back seared with pain. Despite his incredible strength, he couldn't move. He

couldn't see anything either. It was pitch black, but he could hear something with the shred of energy he had left. He strained his ears. There it was again a man's voice. He wasn't alone down here. His friends were imprisoned with him in the debris. And then John Barry heard something else, the unmistakable sound of sores on wood and metal yielding to flame. Someone knew they were down there, Someone was coming to get them. Giuseppe jan Tosca spent hours searching

for Pasqualino, but to no avail. Maria Destacio had been found. She had been right in the path of the monstrous wave and had suffocated immediately, but her brother Tony had survived. He had been thrown against a lamppost and suffered a fractured skull, but a firefighter had managed to pull him from the morass before he drowned. Could Giuseppe's boy have been rescued had he been swept into the harbor, or perhaps he was trapped beneath the debris on the wharf.

In broken English, to Seppi frantically questioned the dazed and injured along Commercial Street, but no one had seen a little boy in a red sweater. Firefighters had rallied to reach their trapped colleagues from Engine thirty one chopping and digging through the wreckage was perilous work. With every move they made, the remains of the building shifted around them. They found some of their fellows in time, but thirty four year old father of three, George Lahey was dragged

from the wreckage dead. After three hours and as many injections of morphine into his back, John Barry heard a saw slicing away at the wood near his head. It was getting closer and closer, and then quite suddenly it stopped, and he felt the great weight beheaved from his back. The exhausted stonecutter was lifted onto a stretcher and rushed to hospital. When his stricken daughters reached the ward, they didn't recognize him. Their powerful father had vanished. In his

place was a fragile old man. Arthur Jell visited the waterfront. He was aghast at the devastation, but kept calm. There would be a plausible explanation for the disaster, one that absolved Usia and himself of any responsibility. In the days that followed, the flood, clean up operation began. Businesses had been decimated and the harbor police picked all sorts of objects out of the water rolls of cloth, barrels of ale, tubs of lar. Firemen spread sand on the pavements and

dispersed the tenacious molasses with jets of salt water. On January seventeenth, USIA issued a statement the company knew beyond question that the tank was not weak. This calamity was the work of an outside influence. It was another three days before Giuseppe and Maria Yantosca learned the fate of their son. Rescue workers pulled the body of a little boy in a red sweater from the wreckage. A railroad car carried fifty feet by the wave had crushed him

into a wall. Giuseppe was asked to identify the child. He was slicked with molasses and his face was horribly disfigured. Weeping, Giuseppe lifted his red sweater and saw a second sweater underneath. His heart breaking, he gathered Pasqualino's tiny body in his arms and hugged him close. One hundred and fifty people were injured in the molasses flood, and twenty one people lost their lives. It was months before all the bodies were recovered. At the inquest into the disaster, Judge Wilfred

Bolster rebuked USIA. He was also scathing about the Boston Buildings Department. The city had bypassed the proper permit procedures. No one in the building's department had been qualified to assess whether the steel structure was fit for purpose, and then accepted the paper design simply because it bore the name of a civil engineer. This single accident has cost more in material damage than all the supposed economies in the building department. Laws are cheap of passage, costly of enforcement.

They do not execute themselves, Bolster declared. Despite Judge Bolster's rebuke, a grand jury found that there was insufficient evidence to return an indictment of manslaughter. The people of Boston were appalled USIA was getting away with it. A group of Bostonians prepared to sue the company. If nobody would go to jail for their carelessness, they could at least be made to pay a price, But USIA had some tricks

up its sleeve. Today, it's generally believed that the Boston molasses disaster was the result of brittle fracture, the sudden catastrophic failure of the tank structure due to poor design to withstand the strains they would experience. The tank walls needed to be at least twice as thick. Over time, as the tank was repeatedly emptied and refilled, the steel fatigued. The fatal fracture probably began as a circular hatch at the base of the tank. Engineers balance efficiency, resource allocation,

and safety. Arthur Jell, who oversaw the tank's rapid construction, was a skilled administrator, but he wasn't an engineer. His focus wasn't the complex harmony of function and long term public safety, but short term profit. USIA regarded the residence of Boston's North End not as vulnerable individuals worthy of dignity, as factors in a business model. The company had taken advantage of a power imbalance, knowing that the Italian Americans who lived near the harbor were unlikely to resist the

building of the Malasses tank. USIA also knew that people were suspicious of Italian Americans, and in its next move, it sought to capitalize on that fear. In the wake of the disaster, one hundred and nineteen Bostonians sued USIA, arguing that the Great Vat of Malasses had been structurally deficient and built without proper safeguards. Former caretaker Isaac Gonzalez, who had warned half the gel about the tank and been dismissed, took the stand and told of how malasses

had oozed incessantly through the tank's riveted joins. His hair, now white from the stress of his ordeal, also testified he could no longer work as a stonecutter because he couldn't stand up straight. My back hurts all the time, he said. It's as though my spine is breaking. The doctor says there's no cure. Giuseppe and Tosca described the earth shattering moment his Pasqualino was engulfed by a dark wave. USIA countered that Pasquale an Tosca shouldn't have been there

at all. A company is under no obligation to make its premises safe for trespassers, snarled one defense attorney. USIA held that at lunchtime on January the fifteenth, nineteen nineteen, unknown anarchists, probably Italian, had dropped a bomb in the tank. The company had spent more than fifty thousand dollars on expert witnesses to support its claims. It continued to take this line even after a professor from MIT testified that the tank had been of insufficient thickness to withstand the

pressure of the molasses inside. Order Sir Hugh Ogden listen to nearly one thousand witnesses and heard over twenty thousand pages of testimony. The proceedings took five years, but in the end he rejected USIA's claims of sabotage. I cannot help feeling that a proper regard for the appalling possibility of damage to persons and property contained in the tank in case of accident demanded a higher standard of care in inspection from those in authority. Ogden declared he recommended

that the plaintiffs received damage. A private agreement was reached and in nineteen twenty five USIA took a charge against profits of six hundred and twenty eight thousand dollars due to the Boston tank accident, about eleven point five million dollars. Today, that's not nothing, but split between one hundred and nineteen traumatized and grievously injured plaintiffs. It's also not very much.

USIA closed its Cambridge plant and fired the people that worked there, But Arthur P. Gell seems to have got his New York City promotion, he took the vice presidency at another USIA subsidiary, the American Solvents and Chemical Association. Gell remained a company man through and through. In nineteen thirty one, he was named in a federal grand jury indictment against USIA for violating prohibition laws. He died in nineteen sixty three at the ripe old age of eighty four,

survived by his wife, daughter, and four grandchildren. Isaac Gonzales had warned Jel about the tank, and when his warnings had been repeatedly ignored, he'd quit and joined the army. After the war, he faced yet another test of his courage. He scaled a burning building to rescue a woman and her three small children, wrapping them in bedclothes and carrying them out. When they were safe, he returned to the blazing apartment just in case anyone had been left behind.

The fire cut his exit off, and he had to jump to safety from an upper window. Gonzales was a hero, but it's hard not to wonder if his time at the Mala Tank might have left him with some survivor's guilt. If only Arthur Gell had felt the same sense of responsibility. The key source for this episode of Cautionary Tales is Dark Tide the Great Boston Molasses Flood of nineteen nineteen by Stephen Pulio. For a full list of sources, see

the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales as written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio. Bend and Daphaffrey edited the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been popped without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohene, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey,

and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. It really makes a difference to us. And if you want to hear the show, add free and get access to exclusive content, sign up to the Cautionary Club that is over at patreon dot com Slash Cautionary Club