180: The Deadly Molasses Flood of 1919
Ghost Town: Strange History, True Crime, & the Paranormal
Ghost Town
3.7 • 938 Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2021
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A deadly tidal wave overcomes the streets of Boston in 1919.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Boston, Melassica. I'm Jason Horton. |
| 0:02.6 | I'm Rebecca Leib. |
| 0:03.6 | And this is Ghost Town. |
| 0:20.4 | If you had to guess a food that might kill 21 people, |
| 0:23.2 | you'd probably guess what? |
| 0:25.0 | Bad meat or a lettuce fungus? |
| 0:27.6 | I doubt you'd guess molasses in the first 10, 20 guesses, maybe more. |
| 0:33.9 | But on January 15th, 1919, that's exactly what happened. |
| 0:37.8 | In the north end of Boston, Massachusetts, |
| 0:39.8 | a large storage tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses burst, |
| 0:44.6 | killing 21 and injuring 150 people, |
| 0:47.4 | and it also had other strange effects that we were going to get into. |
| 0:51.0 | It was called the Great Molasses Flood, |
| 0:52.9 | the Boston molasses disaster, or deliciously, |
| 0:56.2 | no pun intended because the next one's going to have one, |
| 0:58.4 | the Boston molassica. |
| 1:00.3 | It all went down at 529 commercial street, |
| 1:02.6 | the headquarters of purity distilling company. |
| 1:05.2 | Molasses would be temporarily stored there by the company. |
| 1:08.3 | They used tanks to offload the sweet sticky substance from ships, |
| 1:12.1 | and then transfer it by pipeline to the purity ethanol plant in Cambridge, |
| 1:16.2 | used there for alcohol. |
... |
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