A sticky situation in Boston

My grandfather always liked to get up to a breakfast of biscuits and sorghum molasses. It was my first encounter with this sticky sweet stuff.

It was a habit my grandfather developed during the Great

Depression, which lasted from 1929 to the start of World War II.

Molasses is a sweet syrupy byproduct extracting sugar from sugarcane or sugar beets.

It was often used as a low-cost replacement for honey. That was a time when people had little or no money and cheap products like molasses were welcome when items like honey were too expensive.

Today, few people eat molasses directly as my grandfather did. However, many eat it not knowing it has been added to other products.

It is a frequently used sweetener in many food products today, in the production of alcoholic beverages and even some munition.

People in the Massachusetts town of Boston knew what it was in 1919 when 21 people were killed by their sticky substance.

It wasn’t that the molasses went bad and poisoned people. Instead they drowned in the sticky substance.

On January 15, 1919, a tank of molasses near the city’s shipyards burst and sent a tidal wave of the stuff moving down the city streets at about 35 miles per hour.

The wave knocked down people. It covered them up and they drowned because the weight of the molasses kept them from coming up for air.

Those attempting to rescue the flood victims could not because they found it hard to lift those under the sticky stuff without being pulled under themselves.

The search for victims lasted four days. Some victims were carried into Boston Harbor and their bodies were not found for several days or even weeks later. It was a disaster unique in American history.

Rescue workers and those who had been in the wave -- but escaped

-- left trails of molasses all over the city. Newspaper reports from the time said the entire city smelled of molasses.

Nobody had any idea how to clean up such a mess that had been stored in a tank that was 25 feet deep and 90 feet in diameter.

Eventually, it was decided to use sand to soak it up and salt water from a firefighting boat to wash it into the harbor.

Reports of the day say the harbor turned a brown color from the sand and molasses washed into it. It remained that color until summer.

The cleanup took weeks to complete. Some believe the city will never be completely clean.

In the 1970s, I went to a market in the Boston harbor area with my wife and some friends. It was a warm spring day. I thought I could smell some kind of flower I was unfamiliar with.

One of the venders told me of Great Molasses Flood. He said what I was smelling was molasses that still hadn’t been cleaned out of all the city’s cracks and crevices.

It is still said that after more than a century that sweet small still covers the city on a warm day.

I found it incredible that a sweet treat I had always known because of my grandfather had caused such a mess.

As is normal after a disaster, people began looking for a reason for why it happened.

It was determined the man who built the tank was not an engineer or even had any experience building any kind of tank. He just built the tank the cheapest way possible because there were no regulations or inspection requirements at that time.

He had even painted it brown to hide the fact that it was so poorly constructed it had small leaks. Before it burst, the tank had recently been filled from a ship that had hauled molasses to Boston. People said they heard the tank groaning after it was filled, but thought nothing of it.

This one-of-a-kind disaster began a change in American cities. From then on, towns passed laws for safety inspections and municipal building requirements on construction.

There were lawsuits that were put together to become one of the successful first class-action suits in American history. It changed the way courts handle several lawsuits on the same topic.

Finally, there was Boston itself that would never smell the same again. Unlike the famous Boston Tea Party, the Great Molasses Flood replaced the normal smell of the harbor with a very unique one.