On January 15, 1919 an enormous vat of molasses exploded at a factory in Boston. The fifty foot vat spilled out 2.5 million gallons of molasses into the streets of Boston and is estimated to have travelled at a rate of 35mph in an 8-15 ft high wave. Twenty-one people died, “and 150 injured as the hot molasses crushed, asphyxiated, and cooked many of the victims to death.” A nearby train was blown off the tracks, and it took six months to clean all the molasses out of the streets. The harbor ran brown until the summer. In one of the first class action lawsuits in the country, the owner of the distillery paid out approximately a million dollars in damamges.

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