MASSACHUSETTS: The Great Molasses Flood – Boston’s Deadly 1919 Disaster

On January 15, 1919, a five-story steel tank in Boston’s North End burst without warning, unleashing two and a half million gallons of molasses in a thirty-five-mile-per-hour wave that killed twenty-one people and injured 150 more. What sounds like a bizarre urban legend was in fact one of the deadliest industrial disasters in American history—and the event that helped rewrite corporate liability law.