0:00 From the evidence box, your correspondent has retrieved case file number one-nine-one-nine-B.0:07 The steel walls of the holding tank were less than one inch thick, and they were tasked with containing over two million gallons of molasses.0:19 As we continue our work through these forgotten files, unboxing the crimes history hoped you would never hear, this case from Boston’s North End stands as a monument to profound and lethal negligence.0:36 The year was nineteen fifteen.0:39 The Purity Distilling Company, a subsidiary of United States Industrial Alcohol, needed a place to store vast quantities of molasses before it was fermented into industrial alcohol for munitions.0:55 They erected a colossal steel tank in the heart of a dense, working-class neighborhood.1:02 Fifty feet tall, ninety feet across.1:05 The man overseeing its construction, Arthur Jell, had no engineering qualifications.1:13 The steel he approved was brittle, with insufficient manganese to withstand Boston’s cold winters.1:21 The plans were never properly reviewed.1:24 From the moment it was filled, the tank was a known failure.1:29 It groaned and shuddered under the strain.1:33 It leaked so profoundly that local children would bring pails to collect the sweet, dark syrup that oozed constantly from its seams.1:44 Residents complained.1:46 Workers reported hearing the metal strain.1:49 The company’s response was to paint the tank brown, so the leaks would be less obvious.1:57 They did nothing more.1:58 On January fifteenth, nineteen nineteen, a deceptively mild day, the tank was filled near its capacity.2:07 At approximately twelve-thirty in the afternoon, eyewitnesses reported a low rumble, then a sound like machine-gun fire as the rivets shot from their holes.2:20 The tank ruptured.2:22 A wave of molasses, fifteen to forty feet high and traveling at thirty-five miles per hour, exploded outward.2:31 It was not a flood.2:33 It was a battering ram of viscous fluid that hit with the force of a locomotive.2:39 The wave buckled the elevated train tracks overhead, tossing a train car from its path.2:47 It lifted a firehouse from its foundation, killing one fireman inside.2:53 Buildings were flattened.2:55 Horses, trapped in their stables, were drowned where they stood.3:00 Patrolman Frank McManus’s voice was recorded in the log, a model of terrified composure: “Send all available rescue vehicles and personnel immediately!3:13 There’s a wave of molasses coming down Commercial Street!” The rescue was a nightmare.3:20 One hundred fifty people were injured.3:23 Twenty-one people died, some crushed instantly, others suffocating slowly in the thick, sticky tide.3:32 Cadets from the USS Nantucket rushed to the scene, pulling victims from the wreckage.3:39 The Red Cross set up a makeshift hospital.3:42 But for many, it was too late.3:45 The molasses clogged their airways and held them fast as it cooled.3:51 One man, George Layhe, was trapped for hours in a crawlspace, conscious and speaking to rescuers before the suffocating weight of the syrup finally took him.4:04 The company’s first public statement was a lie.4:08 They blamed anarchist saboteurs.4:11 It was a convenient fiction in an era of political paranoia.4:16 But the truth was far simpler, and far more damning.4:20 The subsequent investigation, which became the first major class-action lawsuit in Massachusetts, lasted for years.4:30 An auditor, appointed by the court, heard from over one thousand witnesses.4:36 He concluded, unequivocally, that the tank had collapsed under the weight of its own structural failures.4:45 USIAC was found liable for every single death.4:49 This disaster bears the sad hallmarks of so many industrial tragedies—profits valued above human life.4:57 But here, the analogy breaks.5:00 Unlike so many other cases where corporations evaded responsibility, here, they did not.5:07 The ruling was a landmark, forcing states to enact modern building codes requiring that licensed engineers sign and seal all plans.5:18 It established a new precedent for corporate accountability.5:23 The story faded from memory not because it was insignificant, but perhaps because its victims were laborers, immigrants, and children—the anonymous heart of a city.5:37 For decades after, residents claimed on hot summer days, they could still smell the sweet, ghostly scent of molasses in the North End.
