Too Much of a Good Thing

I love odd little bits of information. Strange little facts that you can pop out at random moments, covering a bit of esoteric knowledge. It takes the place of actually knowing anything substantial quite nicely.

For instance, did you know that the Boston’s North End was once hit by a flood of molasses? On Jan. 15th, 1919, a fifty foot tall container of blackstrap, holding about 2.5 million gallons, collapsed catastrophically. A wall of sticky sludge, estimated at between 8 and 15 feet in height, moving at about 35 MPH, spread out in all directions, smashing houses, destroying a section of elevated train track mere seconds after a train had passed, and killing 21 people. One of the deceased wasn’t found for 11 days; he was a delivery man who had been washed into the harbor, along with his truck. The container that collapsed had been built in 1915, overseen by a man who couldn’t even read the blueprints, and, upon the discovery of copious and continuous leaks, wasn’t repaired, just painted brown, so that the leaking molasses was harder to spot. They say the North End smelled of molasses for years. Far from admitting any culpability, the company that owned the defective container claimed that ‘Italian Anarchists’ had planted a bomb in it. But the judge didn’t buy it, and the company was forced to pay $600,000 in damages, which comes to just about $6.6 million in today’s dollars.