The judge in the case was Hugh Ogden, son of an Episcopalian minister and a decorated Army veteran. Their lives and their livelihoods were dramatically undervalued. As a cold calculation based solely on lost compensation, the dollar amount was bound to relatively modest given that the victims were longshoremen, drivers, pavers, messengers and blacksmiths. The plaintiffs were awarded $628,000, around $10 million in today’s dollars - not nearly enough. Yes - in fact, the biggest lawsuit in Massachusetts history at the time. Of course, they’re also the “mistakes were made” guys, with that rare and precious gift of distancing themselves from failure and consquences. They’re the vision guys, rolling their eyes at these small-minded pedants with their endless complaints. But often the people who ascend fastest are the ones who can put the most distance between themselves and failure. In some cases, those further down the totem pole are closer to the problem and notice the warning signs before anyone else. Gonzales’ behavior touches on a disaster dynamic I’ve seen over and over: “lower-status” people (younger, less educated, subordinate) taking on more accountability than those who are officially responsible. He quit one year prior to the explosion and joined the Army, though the war ended while he was still in training. At one point, Gonzales even took to sleeping on site, believing he could sound a warning if the tank burst. He noted how the tank shivers and groans whenever it’s filled with a new shipment of molasses and warned his managers. In Puleo’s telling, he is haunted by the prospect of the tank exploding. The Cassandra of this epic disaster was a worker named Isaac Gonzales. Purity Distilling painted the tank brown so the drips would be less obvious. Molasses dripped from the seams so frequently, neighborhood kids would come by daily to fill their buckets with it. The fact that Jell was promoted 11 months after the tragedy is one of the more enraging facts in a story absolutely packed with them. And when it came time to test the fifty-foot-tall behemoth, Jell had it filled with a measly six inches of water. The steel used to make the tank was 10% thinner than specified. With absolutely no engineering training, he plucked safety requirements for the tank out of thin air. Arthur Jell, Purity Distilling’s treasurer, was in a rush to complete the tank before the end of the year and he cut every possible corner. Anarchist Luigi Galleani and his followers were responsible for a number of deadly bombings throughout the decade, and Italians made for an easy scapegoat. This was the era of the First Red Scare, marked by strikes, raids and bombings. USIA contended that the explosion was caused by anti-war anarchists, many of whom were Italian immigrants. Prejudice against Italians played a major part in this story. All the deceased were from poor or working-class families, Irish and Italian, who lived in the neighborhood. Weapons manufacturing continued even after the war ended, and since USIA anticipated Prohibition on the horizon, they wanted to distill as much alcohol as possible before the hammer came down.Įighteen men, one woman, and two ten-year-old children. Trains would then transport the molasses from the harbor to a distillery in East Cambridge. In 1915, Purity Distilling Company, a subsidiary of United States Industrial Alcohol, built the tank to hold molasses brought by ship from the Caribbean. Molasses played a large role in the wartime economy it was distilled into industrial alcohol, which was in turn used to make munitions for World War I. Why was there a huge tank of molasses on Boston’s waterfront anyway? Homes were destroyed, people drowned or were crushed by debris, and horses flailed in vain to escape. On January 15, 1919, a 50-foot-high tank of molasses burst, spilling 2.3 million gallons of the viscous stuff over an entire neighborhood.
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