Short Stuff: Boston Molasses Flood

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Hey and welcome to the short stuff, but I should say hey and welcome to the short stuff. No. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave, so this is short stuff. That was going to taste less, even though it's been more than a hundred years. Yeah. Crazy. It's still, I think as it's sometimes taken too lightly, you're expressed too lightly. It's a pretty big tragedy that we're about to talk about. That's right. The 1919 Boston, molasses flood that I was positive we had covered and it had to be on a when we made those dumb videos back in the day. Not don't be dumb. Those were good videos. All the other ones were dumb. Ironically. And no thanks, man. Enough people had, have written in over the years to ask us for it, that's where I've heard of it. I don't remember talking about it. We had to have, I looked it up just to make sure, but stuff you miss in history class back and they they covered it, but this is our shorty version. And so we'll take you back. Let's hop in the way back machine. It's been a minute. Let's do it. It is so dusty and it sounds funny, but let's crank it up. Look out for that spider, that's pretty big, that's pretty much fine. But it came from the Mesozoic era so get that explains why that explains why. So we're going to go back to January 15, 1919 to Boston to the north end of Boston to commercial street in the north end. It's a pretty warm day for January. So there's a lot of people out and about trying to get a little bit of sun. And everyone is hearing a weird sound. Some people said it sounds like gunfire. Some people sounds like a train, like a rumbling of the L train. And when you look up all of a sudden, you see a 2.3 million gallon wave, 25 feet high and 160 feet wide, coming at us at 35 miles an hour. Can you imagine? No sir. I can't imagine a water wave like that. No, I know. And that's the thing. There's a couple of different properties about this that make it way worse than a wave of water. And one is that molasses is denser than water. So the effect it has when it slams into is going to be even worse than when water does. And two, after it slams into you and takes you under, it's going to start to solidify and congeal once it stops moving. And you're going to have a lot of trouble getting out of it. And so that happened to a lot of people that injured I think 150 people. And in addition to that, 21 people were killed and in addition to that, a lot of animals were killed. And then in addition to that, a lot of property was destroyed. So this was a big, big deal when this happened. Yeah, I can't imagine a more horrifying death than being basically suffocated and squashed by 2.3 million gallons of molasses in a wave. It's horrible to think about. Yeah, I feel that way about landslides. And I think this is very similar to that. Yeah, for sure. So who do we have to blame for this? We have the purity distilling company whose parent company was the United States industrial alcohol. And they are squarely to blame as we'll see. They made brum and industrial alcohol on the north end there. And they built a big, huge tank to hold this molasses. It was 52 feet tall, 90 feet wide, and at its peak, holds about 2.5 million gallons. And on this day, there were 2.3 million gallons. Man, that is so many gallons of molasses, right? And you say, well, why did they like molasses this much, were they making liquid compost? You say, no, no, don't be silly. Instead, they were using it as the main ingredient for this alcohol. Again, you said they make rum. Yeah. I guess they made a ton of rum because that's a lot of molasses. And they found that this tank was not built by anybody who knew what they were doing essentially, and that it was not structurally sound, even from the beginning, and that even the locals in the north end were like, well, yeah, this thing's been leaking for a really long time. You can see it coming out of the scenes. And so purity distilling company had a solution for that. They painted the tank brown so that you couldn't see the molasses coming out of the scenes anymore. And they said, easy, peasy, job done. Yeah. And like, people would go get the molasses. Those kids would be like, this is awesome, sweet molasses over there at the scene. So it was very well known. What strikes me as odd on January 15th, this was a year before prohibition, well, I guess they did. Did they know prohibition was coming? That was my question. I don't know. Okay. That's probably an unwarranted suspicion, then. Well, you could make industrial alcohol still, so I don't think they were going to be out of business. Okay. All right. That's what I was wondering. You know me so well. You saw what I was headed with that. All right. So this rushes through at 35 miles an hour, like I said. Smaller buildings were completely crushed and consumed. Larger buildings were moved off their foundations, and knocked an L train off of its tracks. And like you said, 21 people died. A lot of them were sort of laborers and drivers in the area in the north end. But there were also kids, Pascual, Antosca, and Maria Dostosio were two 10-year-olds who were out just enjoying the sun, and they were killed. It's brutally sad. Yeah. So is a firefighter named George Leahy who had gone to bed, I guess, after the late shift at Engine 31 station, and I think he had gone to bed and maybe the basement in the basement was swamped with molasses, so he died in bed. And so, you know, all of this horror and carnage of people and animals, like a lot of horses were killed too, because this is a really like working class area. So there was a lot of horses like pulling carts and wagons and stuff at the time that were stuck in this stuff or drowned in it as well. But in addition to that, all that destruction, what made it even worse is that it was covered in molasses that had solidified, which made it really hard to clean up, like to just get like these pieces of eltrine or pieces of building or whatever, out of the neighborhood, you couldn't even do it because it was stuck in just a ton of molasses. That's right, but they had a solution, and we'll talk about that right after this. If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future, Elon Musk, Derio Amadeh, Alex Carr, Fefe Lee, Palmer Lucky, because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they feel, and where they think this is all headed. Silicon Valley is always saying the cliché thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, who's imagination do we want to live in? This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity. Listen to The Builders, on the IHOT radio app Apple Podcast, or ever get your podcasts. The first thing I hate about Ulysses is they never actually tell the Turks. I'm Dave, and I've been it for my life. In October 2021, my brother David was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A year later, he convinced me to make a podcast with him. This podcast. Okay, so here we go. We didn't know what we were doing, so we just started recording. We discussed cancer, since the radiation had lost about 10 more pounds. We fought. Yeah, pisses me off. And we talked openly about the fact that David was going to die. I am afraid of being forgotten. My brother David is the story of the last chapter of my brother's life. It's weird and messy and vulnerable and and I'm gonna share all of it with you. - The constant back-and-forth battle about how do I not just be alive, but I should live. - Listen to my brother, David, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. (dramatic music) (dramatic music) - We're back, everybody. I do wanna point something out. I mentioned earlier that most of the people who perish were laborers and drivers and stuff for the North End Paving Yard. That is not, and then we highlighted a few, you know, a couple of kids in a firefighter. I hope they didn't sound like we were just saying like their lives didn't matter because they were lowly laborers. And let's talk about the firefighter and kids. We just wanted to highlight some real names. - Yeah, well, hopefully most people got that. But they just stopped a couple of bad reviews on Apple. - Well, I just wanna clear that up. Like they wanted to clear up the North End, and we promised talk of a solution and the solution was saltwater. It breaks down molasses. So they were like, all right, we've got the idea here now. We're gonna pump water from the harbor, that engine 31, which is the firehouse that was consumed where the firefighter died. They used their fireboat. And it worked pretty well. They very sadly were still pulling bodies. I think that the last body they found four months later. So it was a pretty slow process still. - So initially people were like, well, what happened? And purity distilling company said anarchists. And anarchists clearly bombed our companies, tank, holding tank, and that was what did it, wasn't us. And they beat that drum like the whole time. But I guess once somebody started looking into it, there was a World War I decorated veteran named Hugh Ogden, who was tasked with acting as auditor, to basically get to the bottom of this. And he found out pretty quickly that it was, like you said, 100% that company's fault in responsibility. - Yeah, I think this is still known in a lot of circles as like an explosion that like blew this tank open. And that's just not true. I guess the sound they heard was just this thing. I mean, I wanna say exploding, but it wasn't an explosion, but this tank failing was what they heard. - Yeah, I'm sure it made its way out of that tank once the tank failed pretty quickly, probably close to what would have seemed like an explosion initially. I could see people mistaking that, right? - Yeah, but there was no regulation at the time. That's not to say they weren't responsible, but there was no like oversight for this kind of thing back then in 1919, but you can bet there was afterward, right? - Yeah, they changed the rules for something like a holding tank. I mean, like if they had made a bridge, some agency or other would have had to check off on it, but there was nothing like that for that kind of thing. Then there was afterward, you had to have an architect and an engineer on file look at your plans and say this is structurally sound, this is gonna work and then you had to file the plan with the city of Boston and very quickly after that, they kind of ended up setting the pace for other cities around the country who required the same thing shortly after. So there was a silver lining to it in that sense that they went in and made sure that something like this wouldn't happen again, but you know, that didn't bring the people back or the horses. - Yeah, I mean, this is one of those things like with the hotel fire and I feel like we've covered quite a few tragedies where they had this kind of same kind of silver lining that things changed for the better afterward. - Yeah. - The US industrial alcohol business, the company that parent company of purity distillery was forced to pay about a million, 19, 19 dollars, or 19, 20 inch dollars in damages. And I looked up, I was, you know, wanna know what happened in that company and that was the end of that company. - Oh, okay, well that's kind of a silver lining, too, then I guess, 'cause they really should have. - I saw Chuck that even for the standards of the day they used below standard material. So they were cutting corners and with 2.5 million gallons capacity of molasses, that's just dumb. - Does that mean short stuff is out? - Yeah. - Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. (upbeat music)