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The Sticky Nightmare: Boston’s Molasses Flood of 1919 | The Missing Files
On January 15, 1919, Boston experienced one of the most bizarre and terrifying industrial disasters in history: the Great Molasses Flood. In this episode of The Missing Files, host Sally Calhoun reconstructs the events leading up to the collapse of a massive steel storage tank owned by the Purity Distilling Company in the North End neighborhood. What began as a routine thawing of cold molasses for ethanol production turned into a catastrophic failure when thermal expansion and structural negligence caused a 2.3 million-gallon tank to burst. This is not just a story about sticky syrup; it is a…
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