Molasses. Big deal, right? Just one of the ingredients in gingerbread. But imagine two million gallons of it. That’s a lot of gingerbread (actually, it was mostly used as animal feed.) Now imagine a tank of it exploding and flowing through a city, destroying everything in its path.That’s what happened in Boston's North End, where a 58-foot high tank stood in an industrial area. near railroad tracks and an elevated trestle. The city's paving department was located there, along with a freight warehouse, a fire station, and a few houses. Workers were gathering before lunch, maybe talking about the Red Sox (they'd won the pennant in 1918) and the unseasonably warm weather. Two days ago it had been 2° and now it was 43°.Suddenly there was a sound witnesses described as a roar combined with a machine gun-like popping. The huge tank of molasses that belonged to U.S. Industrial Alcohol had exploded. A fifteen foot high wave of liquid and flying metal was hurtling in every direction, at a pressure of two tons per square foot.Four loaded freight cars were washed away by the flood and slammed into buildings. Another freight car smashed through the corrugated iron walls of the warehouse. The freight house was quickly surrounded by molasses five feet deep, and collapsed under the pressure. Its floors fell, and men working in the cellar drowned. The ones who tried to climb out slipped and fell on the stairs.The fire station was knocked off its foundation and nearby houses were struck by debris. One collapsed with people inside. Just after a train passed over it, the rail trestle was knocked down, and another train stopped just in time.All kinds of freight was now being washed along – lumber, shoes, coal, barrels, vegetables – and pummeling anything in its path. It moved at 35 miles an hour, and when people and horses were caught in it they were knocked off their feet and smothered by the thick, viscous fluid. The molasses spread out over several blocks, covering them at two to three feet deep.A policeman had seen the tank explode as he was using a callbox, so rescuers got to the scene quickly. They found a scene of chaos: smashed buildings, trapped victims, terrified survivors, family members looking for loved ones, and everything covered in stinky, sticky molasses. They had to wade through it. Twenty one people died – one of them wasn't found for eleven days – and 150 people were injured. Also lots of horses. That would be like cars and trucks being smashed up now, except that cars and trucks don’t rot. At midnight church bells rang out – not to honor the dead, but because Prohibition was now in effect.Cleanup crews found that plain water wouldn't dissolve the mess and they had to wash it away with seawater. People said the harbor was stained brown by it for a while. As the rescuers and survivors made their way home, they tracked sticky molasses onto every streetcar, bar, pay phone, and public place in Boston and its suburbs. Some say the North End still smells of molasses.Next came the lawsuits. It was the longest hearing in Massachusetts history, with 3,000 witnesses. The company's defense was that the explosion must have been caused by an anarchist's bomb. But no WMDs – weapons of molasses destruction – were found. Furthermore, engineers pointed to evidence like intact windows on upper stories of buildings that would have broken if there'd been a bomb. Of course there were conspiracy theories, that the explosion happened because the company had been trying to distill the molasses into grain alcohol before Prohibition began. There was testimony that the tank had been leaking for years, and the company'd just painted it brown so the leaks wouldn't show.Six years later, the verdict came in: U.S. Industrial Alcohol was responsible, because the tank just hadn't been strong enough. They had to pay almost $1 million damage – $12 million in 2008 dollars. Survivors of the viictims got $1,000, about $12,000 in 2008.I first read about this amazing event in Yankee magazine, and later Smithsonian. I found reprints of those articles at Eric Postpischil's Molasses Disaster Pages . He cites a 2003 book about the disaster,by Stephen Puleo. I was obsessed enough to buy it on Amazon, but it's really more details than I need to know. Still, a must-have for my crime and disaster library. I tried to do some drawings but just couldn't come up with anything good (I'd love to see anybody's efforts!) so I just stole these photos from all over the web.I also found a site ° for the Sucarnoochee, Mississippi , molasses disaster, where there was a similar flood in 1932. Not only does that site describe the flood, it invites us to the Sucarnoochee molasses disaster Festival, which includes a footrace:"On the 25th anniversary of the terrible tragedy, in 1957, the townspeople decided to commemorate the event by recreating it just as it had happened on that fateful day in 1932. And since that time, the people of Sucarnoochee gather every year on a crisp December morning for the "sugar race." Brave runners, many of them descendants of the original 21 victims, gather at the top of Main Street as 10,000 gallons of fast-running corn syrup is released from a large vat. With startling speed, they dash ahead of the speedy slurry, cheating death by mere seconds as the syrup drowns everything in its path."I can't find any other information on the Web about either the disaster or the festival, so I think it's a hoax, but it's a well done one.