Well, as you well know, floods caused by Mother Nature have been plaguing mankind since, I don't know, rain was invented.

But what about man-made floods that don't actually involve water?

Imagine wading through an 18-inch-deep tidal wave of sticky molasses.

Or how about trying to escape a tsunami of hot beer or a torrent of scalding whiskey?

I'm Patty Steele. All of these disasters were caused by the public's love of alcohol and all of them were

deadly. That's next on the backstory. This is an I-Heart podcast.

We're back with the backstory.

So, backstory listener Chuck Bell suggested a story about the great Boston molasses flood of 1919.

And doing some research on that led me down a rabbit hole to the 1814 beer flood in London and then to the 1806 whiskey flood in Glasgow, Scotland. It seems like our thirst for a shot

or something to take the edge off can sometimes lead to trouble. We start off in Boston.

It's around 1230 in the afternoon on January 15th, 1919. It's been a cold winter.

The purity distilling company has an enormous vat of molasses sitting outside its factory. Why molasses?

Well, it turns out it can be fermented to produce ethanol, the active ingredient in all sorts of

alcoholic beverages. It's also a major ingredient in making munitions. The day before the disaster,

a new load of warm molasses had arrived by ship and was transferred into the tank, already

holding molasses that had been super chilled by the cold weather.

Did the temperature variation weaken the tank? Who knows?

Witnesses heard a loud creaking sound.

They said they felt the ground shake and then a roar as it collapsed.

There was a long rumble like a passing train, they said. Others spoke of a

tremendous crashing sound, a deep growling, a thunder clap-like bang, and a sound like a machine gun

as the rivets shot out of the tank. The tank, holding as much as 2.3 million gallons of this

...