Only in Boston by Duncan J.D. Smith

30 North End 10 The Great Boston Molasses Flood MA 02109 (North End), the site of the Great Boston Molasses Flood on Commercial Street at the foot of Copps Hill Terrace T Green/Orange Line to North Station or Haymarket Boston is famous for its wall plaques. Hundreds of them record the city’s history, and they’re especially useful where the physical land- scape of a particular event has changed. A case in point is a plaque on Commercial Street at the foot of Copps Hill Terrace (North End). It marks the site of the city’s most unusual disaster: the Great Boston Molasses Flood. The old wharves backing onto Commercial Street were the place where immigrants once arrived, bales of cotton were landed, and penny ferries docked from East Boston. They were also where cargoes of molasses and sugar were unloaded for use in making candy, alco- holic drinks and even gunpowder. One of the companies benefitting from this was the Purity Distilling Company, which fermented molas- ses at their plant in Cambridge to produce rum. Before transporting the molasses to Cambridge, the company stored it in a huge 2.3 million gallon cylindrical steel tank. Standing 50 feet tall and measuring 90 feet across, it stood in what is now Langone Park. Surrounding it at the time was a Purity Distilling Company ware- house and office, as well as a firehouse and police station, the North End Paving Company, and a Boston Gas Light building. Facing the tank on the opposite side of Commercial Street were domestic residences. Disaster struck at 12.30 on the afternoon of January 15th 1919. Without warning and with “a thunderclap-like bang”, the tank burst. A syrupy wave of molasses 25 feet high rushed out onto Commer- cial Street at an alarming 35 mph. As it did most of the surrounding buildings were engulfed, the elevated railway along Commercial Street buckled, and the domestic residences across the road flattened. In the immediate aftermath, the streets were waist-deep in sticky molasses. First on the scene to help were cadets from the training ship USS Nantucket , which was conveniently moored alongside what is now the Puopolo Athletic Field. They began plucking survivors from the sticky chaos until the Boston Fire Department arrived. The search for survivors went on for four days by which time 21 people were re- ported dead, either crushed or asphyxiated, and another 150 injured.