My daughter's lunch menu always has some little known trivia on it and I thought this was interesting.

During the winter of 1919, Boston, Massachusettes was devastated by a flood - but there was no water involved at all. A fifty-foot tall wooden tank that held molasses broke apart, sending a forty-foot wave of the thick, dark sweetening liquid hurtling through part of the town like a tsunami. The gooey wave of 2.3 million gallons of molasses moved at 35 miles per hour, killing 21 people and injuring hundreds. The water in the harbor was still brown six months later, and some Bostonians swear that, on a warm summer day, you can still smell molasses in the air. Among the books for kids written about the disaster is The Great Molasses Flood by Beth Waner Brust.

I'm having a hard time believing that molasses flowed at 35 MPH during the winter. :)

Shiloh

How odd that you mention it! I read about the same thing with a reading group this afternoon. I don't think they were as impressed as I was.

From what we read the tub didn't just break apart, it EXPLODED it's rivets with a powerful blast. :)

Living in Massachusetts, I can't remember a time when I hadn't heard of the molasses flood. People usually kind of laugh about it, but it was a really horrific way to die. It was waist deep and the rescuers could not get to anyone, so basically the street became a giant piece of fly paper with no hope of getting out.

http://massmoments.org/moment.cfm?mid=19

I'm from the Boston area. I had never heard of this until 1990, I was working with a group of mature engineers at GE. t They told me the story. I thought they were getting back at me for practical joke. But the next day, they brought in pictures of horses stuck and dead. It was beyond my imagination to believe the devastation until I saw the pics.

A few years ago, I took my kids up to Boston and while there, we spent a day walking the Freedom Trail (which I HIGHLY recommend). We bought a great book about the trail and they had a nice write up about this flood and we were able to read it at the actual place that it happened.

Jaxx