The Long And Short Of It: Boston's Great Molasses Flood

Here's a sordid story about a failure in industrial regulation and the people who were killed by that failure. The central incident is bizarre, but the causes and the outcome are sadly still relevant today.
This video was written, researched, and presented by April Grant, and filmed, researched, and edited by Dan Thurston.
There are no gory images, but please be aware that I give detailed descriptions of a number of people’s deaths in an industrial accident.
Our sources include:
Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, by Stephen Puleo. This book is the most comprehensive popular history of the Molasses Flood; most of the information I present in this video came from Dark Tide. To buy a copy, or to learn more about Stephen Puleo’s work, please see his website at www.stephenpul...
Many of the images used in this video are available to the public on the City of Boston Archives: cityofboston.a...
The most comprehensive primary source on the Molasses Flood is the forty-volume transcript of the “Dorr Vs. Industrial Alcohol” hearings. The volumes are housed at the Social Law Library in Boston, MA, and have been partly digitized in recent years. I visited recently and read through a small fraction of the transcripts in both digital and paper format, and would like to thank the reference staff for their assistance. In particular, Jessica Pisano Jones, Brian J. Harkins, and Andrew Hyland were unfailingly kind and went out of their way to respond to my inquiries. For more on the Social Law Library, please see their website: www.socialaw.com/

[@miketaylor6282]

My response to seeing the damage: HOLY MRS. BUTTERWORTH’S!!!

[@Cawendaw]

It makes you wonder how many unsung Gonzales' there've been, who took unlicensed action to relieve a larger problem, and mostly by accident it happened to be enough to prevent a disaster so we never knew about what they'd prevented (until the next time we built the same problem bigger, anyway).

[@Thaelyn1312]

At first, the title does seem funny, but then thinking about the extent of the damage, & trauma & suffering this accident (completely preventable, too!) caused, gods. I did wonder why it would move so fast, but learning about the fermintation plus temp changes between refills, it makes sense why it burst out so fast. Gods, the people in their houses, having ptsd from that, & then like, can you imagine that happening & *all* your stuff, your living space, is covered in molasses, it's all ruined-I just. The sensory nightmare I can feel coming on just imagining my whole room coated in molasses. Those poor fuckin' people, those kids, everyone. Such a preventable trauma.