Susan McCloskey Illustrations by Derrick Williams i
Disasters Table of Contents Introduction.............................. v The Sinking of the Sultana................... 1 The Great Molasses Flood................... 12 The Last Flight of the Hindenburg............. 23 The Tragedy of the U.S.S. Indianapolis.......... 34 Out of the Fog........................... 45 The Photographer and the Fire............... 55 iii
Disasters Introduction Any reporter will tell you that nothing sells newspapers like a story about a disaster. Who knows why? Maybe we like to be reminded of the fickle nature of fate. Say a person gets stuck in traffic and misses his plane. What bad luck! he might think. But what if the plane crashes? All of a sudden he is the luckiest person in the world. And who lies dead in the ruins of the crash? Possibly a person who had everything going for her. In the face of a disaster we are all truly equal. Maybe, too, stories about disasters help us count our blessings. After all, we could have been among the victims. We are sorry v
Disasters it happened. But we are glad it did not happen to us. These six stories recount famous disasters. All of them happened before the mid 1940s. There have been many other major disasters since then. What modernday disasters deserve recounting? vi
Trail of Paper Fish markets. Low tide. The ocean. These are some of the smells of Boston. Well into the 1960s, it also 12
smelled of molasses. (Some say it still does.) People who lived or worked in Boston were used to the smell. They hardly noticed it. And if a visitor asked about it, they could not say where it came from. But there is a tragic reason for Boston s sweet smell of molasses. In 1919, a giant storage tank stood in the North End of Boston, close to the waterfront. Built in 1915, the tank held molasses. The molasses was shipped to Boston from New Orleans and the West Indies. Molasses was in great demand. Some of it was used to make baked beans. But 13
most of it was used to make alcohol. The alcohol was used to produce rum. The tank belonged to the United States Industrial Alcohol Company. Across the street from the tank were some freight sheds and the paving division of the Public Works Department. Next to these was the headquarters of Fire Boat 31. Patrol boats and minesweepers were moored nearby. A trestle for the Boston elevated train was not far away. Old houses and tenements stood close by. To some, this industrial area was just a workplace. But to others it was a neighborhood. They returned there after a 14
day s work. They raised their families there. Their children played there. They lived in the shadow of the giant molasses tank. The tank was huge. It held between 2.2 and 2.5 million gallons of molasses. It was 58 feet high, 90 feet across, and 240 feet around. Its sides were made of curved steel plates half an inch thick stitched together with rivets. The plates that formed its base were set in concrete. Though strong and solid, the tank was known to leak. Did it have a structural problem? The company never bothered to find out. Instead, it fixed the leak by painting the tank brown. Few people 15
would notice the molasses that dripped from its seams. January 15, 1919, was unusually warm. Just three days earlier it had been only two degrees above zero. The next day, the 13th, the temperature was up to 40 degrees. By 12:30 P.M. on the 15th, it was 43 degrees and climbing. It felt like spring. It was too warm to work in coats, so freight handlers took them off. Office workers rolled up their sleeves and ate lunch in the warm sun. Women in the neighborhood opened their windows to let in the warm air. Children went out 16
coatless to pick up coal that fell from the freight cars. Workhorses munched their oats while the sun warmed their backs. A few days earlier, when it was still cold, a new shipment of molasses had been delivered. Now the tank was filled nearly to the brim. Did that have anything to do with the disaster that followed? At about 12:30 P.M., there was a terrible sound. A reporter later described it as a dull, muffled roar. The molasses tank had exploded. Its rivets popped with a sound like machine-gun fire. The tank s 2.3 million gallons of molasses spewed into the streets in a wave 15 feet high. In 17
the unusually warm air, it flowed freely. Traveling at 35 miles an hour, it swept away everything in its path. It washed freight cars off the tracks and hurled one of them through a building. The wall of the freight house briefly stopped the molasses. But when the molasses became five feet deep, the wall collapsed. Many of the workers inside drowned in the onrushing wall of ooze. Others were crushed by the tons of freight that the molasses threw at them. The river of molasses rushed on. It knocked over the fire station. It threw one firefighter through a wall. It drowned workers in the Public Works department 18
who had been eating their lunches. It swept away workhorses. It drowned a child who had been picking up coals. It smashed a house, killing a woman inside. Meanwhile, the walls of the tank had already done their damage. Hurled with great force, one section blasted away a building. Another split the trestle of the elevated train. The trestle collapsed, and the tracks sagged to the ground. At 12:40, an alarm for help was sounded. Rescuers raced to the scene. They placed ladders over the brown goo. By crawling over the ladders, they were able to rescue the injured and find bodies 19
without getting trapped. By the end of the day they had found 15 bodies. At daybreak they began their search again. Soon they found six more. That made 21 dead. More than 150 were hurt. Then the cleanup began. Firefighters hosed down everything in sight. Plain water did not shift the molasses. So they pumped salt water from the bay to clean it up. It took weeks to wash the acres of devastation. Meanwhile, the molasses seeped between bricks and paving stones. Some say that on warm days its smell still rises from the streets of the North End. Did terrorists cause the molasses tank 20
to explode? That s what the company that owned it said. It claimed that a radical group called Bolshevists planted a bomb at the tank. But most people believed that gases caused by fermenting molasses made the tank explode. Others thought that the cold molasses expanded quickly in the warm weather, causing the tank to burst at the seams. Many lawsuits were filed against the company. After a long trial, the court decided that the company was to blame. It said that the tank was not safe. The company had to pay $1 million in damages. 21
Today, nothing in the area is the same. Close to where the tank stood now stands the New England Aquarium. A playground is nearby. Old warehouses converted to condos border the site. There is no reminder of the deadly explosion. Except, perhaps, if the day is warm, the dark, sweet smell of molasses. 22