It was promising to be an uncharacteristically warm winter day in Boston. The temperature on Jan. 15, 1919, had soared to 40 degrees from 2 degrees earlier in the week, prompting many downtown workers to head outdoors.

Shortly after noon in the city’s bustling North End, as Model T Fords chugged by and elevated trains screeched above Commercial Street, a group of firefighters sat down for a game of cards in a firehouse near a massive tank that stored molasses used in the production of industrial alcohol.





As the firefighters puzzled over their hands, they heard a strange staccato sound. The rivets on the 50-foot-high storage tank began to shoot off and a dull roar followed. At the noise, firefighter Paddy Driscoll whipped around. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed as he saw the dark torrent spilling out. “Run!”

The Great Molasses Flood was underway. The syrup swamped one of Boston’s busiest neighborhoods, killing 21 and injuring 150.

“Midday turned to darkness as the 2.3 million gallons of molasses engulfed the Boston waterfront like a black tidal wave, 25 feet high and 160 feet wide at the outset,” Stephen Puleo recounted in his book “Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919,” which vividly captures details of the disaster, including the chilling reactions of Driscoll and others to the tank rupture.

Boston Police patrolman Frank McManus spotted the 26 million-pound wall of goop and shouted to the dispatcher, “Send all available rescue vehicles and personnel immediately — there’s a wave of molasses coming down Commercial Street!”

By now traveling at 35 mph, the wave of sugary doom tore through the North End with enough power to crumple small structures, blast a truck through a fence, knock the firehouse off its foundation and rip away a beam supporting the elevated train tracks.

Within seconds, two city blocks were inundated — and the death toll began to climb.

City workers who were taking advantage of the warmth to eat lunch outside drowned where they sat. Two 10-year-olds who were collecting firewood near the molasses tank were swept away. Others suffocated as their homes and basements quickly filled.

“I was in bed on the third floor of my house when I heard a deep rumble. … I awoke in several feet of molasses,” Martin Cloughtery told the Boston Globe in 1919. “A pile of wreckage was holding me down, and a little way from me I saw my sister. I struggled out from under the wreckage and pulled my sister toward me and helped her on to a raft. I then began to look for my mother.”