Tag Archives: Failure

BROWN DEATH — BOSTON’S MONSTROUS MOLASSES MASSACRE

A massive molasses storage tank ruptured in downtown Boston, Massachusetts at 12:40 pm on Wednesday, January 15, 1919. 2.3 million gallons of liquid sludge, weighing over 12,000 tons, burst from the receptacle and sent a surge of brown death onto Boston’s streets. The sickly sweet wave was 40 feet high and moved at 35 miles per hour. When the sugary flood stopped, 21 people were dead and over 150 suffered injuries. Property damage was in the millions, and the legal outcome changed business practices across America. Sadly, the Boston Molasses Disaster, or Boston Molasses Flood, was perfectly preventable.

The molasses tank (reservoir or container, if you will) belonged to the Purity Distillery Company owned by United States Industrial Alcohol (USIA). It was 50 feet tall (five stories), 90 feet in diameter, and had a circumference of 283 feet. At the time, the Boston molasses tank was the city’s largest liquid storage facility. It was also the deadliest.

In January 1919, Boston was a happening place. The U.S. concluded World War I efforts two months earlier and was on the verge of Prohibition being enacted. Alcohol was in huge demand, both recreational for making spirits and industrial for manufacturing explosives. Molasses was a staple source for both, and Boston was an ideal spot for storing molasses.

Through Purity Distilling, USIA owned a strategic location on Commercial Street at Boston’s north end waterfront. It’s now a public place called Langone Park. The tank site was adjacent to a wharf where longshoremen could unload molasses tankers arriving from sugar cane plantations in the West Indies, pump the slurry mix to the receptacle, and then load it into rail cars when needed by USIA’s Purity distillery in Cambridge, west of downtown Boston.

The tank’s construction began in 1915, but it suffered delays. Completion occurred in 1917 and it went into operational use with little testing applied. Immediately, molasses leaks appeared at riveted seams where the metal panels overlapped. Many nearby residents, mostly Italian immigrants, complained of the unsightly mess and unfavorable smell. USIA’s response was not to fix the leaks but paint the tank brown to mask the molasses stains.

People complained about more than the appearance and the odor. Employees who worked around the tank heard creaks and groans coming from within the molasses storage unit. They felt shudders and shakes when the tank was loaded and unloaded, and they sounded their concerns about the structural integrity of the hastily-built monstrosity. Their voices fell on deaf management ears.

On January 12, 1919, the shaky tank took on a 1.3 million gallon load of Cuban molasses. The tank was at its highest-ever capacity with an overall weight of 26 million pounds. The molasses sat until the Wednesday morning when the sun came up and began an unusual temperature gain for that time of year.

Without warning, at 40 minutes past noon, the molasses tank ruptured at its bottom seams. A massive force sent metal debris flying as heavy-weight shrapnel with the gooey molasses mess radiating in a four-story-high wave knocking buildings off their foundations, smashing their wood frames to smithereens, toppling freight cars, and killing these innocent people:

Patrick Breen, age 44
William Brogan, age 61
Bridget Clougherty, age 65
Stephen Clougherty, age 34
John Callahan, age 43
Maria Di Stasio, age 10
William Duffy, age 58
Peter Francis, age 64
Flaminio Gallerani, age 37
Pasquale Iantosca, age 10
James Kenneally, age 48
Eric Laird, age 17
George Lehaye, age 38
James Lennon, age 64
Ralph Martin, age 21
James McMullen, age 46
Cesar Nicolo, age 32
Thomas Noonan, age 43
Peter Shaughnessy, age 18
John Seiberlich, age 69
Michael Sinnott, age 78

First responders were overcome with one main obstacle. That was trying to move in the 2 to 3-foot deep pool of semi-liquid molasses that thickened as the day cooled and the goo dropped to the ambient temperature of Boston’s wintertime. It took 4 days to recover nearly-unrecognizable bodies and decontaminate them so identification could be made.

Medical workers established a field hospital to treat assorted injuries like broken bones, crushed organs, and obstructed airways. Cleanup efforts took months. And the molasses smell remained ingrained in Boston’s air for years. Today, over 100 years later, local legend says you can still whiff molasses on hot summer nights.

The Investigation and Legalities Began

Someone had to be accountable for Boston’s monstrous molasses massacre. Those were the people managing USIA’s storage facility in North Boston, and the process would take six years. Eventually, no individual was prosecuted for a criminal act although the utter negligence displayed in (lack of) planning, overseeing, and commissioning the molasses tank’s construction was outrageous.

Two factors drove the need for such a large molasses container. First was the marketplace because, at the Roaring Twenties onset, there was a highly-profitable demand for recreational and industrial alcohol. The USIA executives wanted to capitalize on molasses-based alcohol products as quickly as possible. Strike while the iron’s hot, as they say.

Second was the onset of Prohibition. The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified the day after the Boston disaster, and to be in effect one year later. After that, the manufacture of recreational alcohol would be illegal and USIA wanted to stockpile as much as possible.

To corner the American molasses market, USIA needed bulk buying power and an economical supply chain including a convenient storage facility. They found it at Boston Harbor, and they relied on one man to oversee the construction project.

Arthur P. Jell was the USIA’s comptroller—their treasurer. Jell wasn’t an architect or an engineer. He had no basic building experience let alone constructing something as large and complex as a steel container capable of safely holding 12,000 tons, or 2.3 million gallons, of a substance weighing 1.4 times the mass of water.

Jell was an accountant. He was a bean counter and thought like one. Jell’s primary focus was on costs and speed. He was also on a shaky career footing.

Arthur Jell was under orders to get the tank built and get it built fast. The USIA bosses assigned Jell to lead the tank project in 1915 which was the early stages of WWI where steel supplies were running scarce through high wartime productions. By 1917, Jell only had the tank’s concrete foundation done. He was running late and under immense pressure to receive a pre-ordered and on-the-way Caribbean molasses shipment of 700,000 gallons.

If the tank wasn’t ready, the USIA executives would have to find another storage facility (of which there were none that size in America) or dump the molasses at sea. Either way was a major loss for USIA and for Arthur Jell himself.

Jell got the tank operational just in time to save the shipment. Through the low-bid contractor, Hammond Iron Works, the molasses receptacle was hammered together and filled without proper testing. And because the tank was a “receptacle” by definition—not a building or a bridge— the City of Boston did not require a permit for anything other than the foundation.

The tank’s structure had no approved plans, sealed drawings, listed specifications, professional oversight, or approved inspections and tight commissioning procedures. The project depended on a tight-fisted, building-ignorant manager and a corner-cutting construction company operating on a profit-first agenda.

Hindsight is usually 20/20. Stephen Puleo does hindsight carefully in his scholarly 2003 book on the Great Boston Molasses Flood titled Dark Tide. Here’s a quote from the book’s description:

For the first time, the story of the flood is told here in its full historical context, from the tank’s construction in 1915 through the multiyear lawsuit that followed the disaster. Dark Tide uses the gripping drama of the flood to examine the sweeping changes brought about by World War I, Prohibition, the anarchist movement, immigration, and the expanding role of big business in society. To understand the flood is to understand America of the early twentieth century – the flood was a microcosm of America, a dramatic event that encapsulated something much bigger, a lens through which to view the major events that shaped a nation. It’s also a chronicle of the courage of ordinary people, from the firemen caught in an unimaginable catastrophe to the soldier-lawyer who presided over the lawsuit with heroic impartiality.

Stephen Puleo’s Dark Tide does a deep dive into the structural failures and cause-effect details for why the molasses tank ruptured. So does a highly-respected company called Think Reliability that does cause-mapping, or root-cause analysis, of significant events. Here are the main points of what occurred to cause the failure of USIA’s giant molasses tank in downtown Boston:

Inadequate Design — The tank’s steel walls were half as thick as best engineering practices should have designed them. This was to save cost. The rivets were inferior, too small, and improperly installed. Again, to save cost as well as speed the timeline. The steel panels had low manganese levels which made the tank brittle at low temperatures. Once again, cost saving.

Inadequate Supervision — Arthur Jell did not understand construction methods and engineering standards. He focused on cost and speed instead of reliability and safety. Hammond Iron Works focused on profit and were not supervised or overseen by proper drawings and specifications as well as competent inspectors. Once more, speed and cost drove the bus with no regard for end-use safety.

Environmental Influence — Setting aside the bad design and lack of oversight, Boston’s environment was a wild card. On January 12, when the tank took the 1.3 million gallon Cuban load, there was a smaller amount of cold molasses sitting at the tank’s base. The Cuban molasses was heated on the tanker so it could be pumped to the storage receptacle. The thermal inequality of hot molasses sitting on cold molasses started a fermentation reaction that off-gassed carbon dioxide and raised the tank’s internal pressure. When the morning temperature unusually rose on January 15 (from overnight of +2F to 40F at noon) the pressure exceeded the steel strength.

Ignored Warning Signs — The creaks and groans and worker warnings went unheard or ignored by persons in USIA’s management. To “paint the tank brown” rather than fix the problem would amount to gross negligence in the current industrial safety world. The courts, today, would think along the same lines and it’s from the litigation following Boston’s monstrous molasses massacre that safety rules—specifically in the design, permitting, and inspection of building projects significantly changed. For the better.

Civil litigation began immediately following the Boston Molasses Disaster. An abundance of lawyers filed 117 separate lawsuits against United States Industrial Alcohol and its subsidiary Purity Distillery. The suits amalgamated into one class-act procedure which was the first time in American history that a class-action of this magnitude began. It set the stage for all other class-action or representative-action legal proceedings.

It took six years to wind through the courts. USIA used the defense that the tank had been an act of sabotage—domestic terrorism—committed by Italian anarchists. There was absolutely no proof of this, but the defense tactic took hold the day following the tank rupture. The Boston papers reported that the tank had “exploded” which indicated some sort of explosive device being set off rather than natural forces of pressure exceeding containment and carried out by gravity.

The presiding judge didn’t buy the explosion argument. In his judgment finding complete fault on behalf of Purity and USIA, the judge wrote, “The tank was wholly insufficient in point of structural strength, insufficient to meet either legal or engineering requirements. The scene was unparalleled in the severity of the damage inflicted to the person and property from the escape of liquid from any container in a great city.” In conclusion, the judge ordered USIA to pay the plaintiffs $628,000 which is approximately $10.12 million in today’s currency.

Aside from the legal impact, American building processes changed after the Boston Molasses Flood. Jurisdiction upon jurisdiction required building projects to be professionally designed, properly constructed, and strictly inspected by competent authorities. Today, all major works are intricately designed and approved with architect/engineering stamps and carried out by qualified workers under legal permits.

And today, the site of the brown death—Boston’s monstrous molasses massacre—is a pretty park containing a Little League baseball field, a playground, and bocce courts. There’s a small plaque paying tribute to its horrific past.

WHY AMERICA CAN’T EFFECTIVELY CONTROL GUNS

Every socially interconnected person in the world watches news reports of mass shootings in the United States of America. Most horrific are school student slayings where innocent kids are slaughtered by bullet volleys from automatic assault rifles. Then, there are multitudes of single gun-related murders, suicides and accidents. This rarely happens in other civilized counties where effective gun control prevents these tragedies from happening.

The key word is “effective”, as many individual American states do have gun control measures that reduce firearm access—especially to juvenile, criminal and mentally unstable individuals. But, the sad reality is that obtaining firearms and ammunition is far too easy in some of the states. It’s extremely difficult to effectively control guns at the federal level in America for historical and political reasons. There are also restrictions on studying the issue, so solutions can be formulated based on facts and information, rather than raw emotion.

Some American citizens are armed to the teeth, and they have no intention of infringing their constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Not all Americans, by any means, but foreigners wonder why these few fanatics have this fascination with firearms. It’s like a love affair with their guns. To shed light on the American gun control issue, retired East Providence, Rhode Island police captain and author, Joe Broadmeadow, shares his thoughts and gives a brief history of America’s obsessive gun culture.

America’s Love Affair with Guns — A Brief History by Joe Broadmeadow

We can trace the genesis of the “American” gun culture back to the western expansion of the original colonies after the Revolutionary War. In crafting the Constitution, fear of a strong government backed by a standing army under the control of a monarch guided much of the design behind the American Government. Each of the three branches, Executive, Judicial and Legislative sharing power, is a check and balance against absolute centralized power.

One of the most influential groups, the Scots/Irish, contributed much of the fighting force of the Continental Army and carried with them a long-imbued loathing of English royal tyranny. These backwoodsmen’s guerilla tactics served as an equalizer to the overwhelming British numbers. So successful were the tactics that Ho Chi Minh studied and adapted them in the American War in Vietnam.

These Scots/Irish hated the English, hated government intrusion, and would die rather than yield. These rugged, independent colonists led the way west. Their resistance to governmental authority manifested itself in the language of the Constitution, an accommodation to these sentiments by the Virginia and New England aristocracy crafting the document.

A Well Regulated Militia

The famous Second Amendment—with its confusing wording—sought to lessen this fear when those forming the new government never envisioned the need for a standing army. They believed the separation of the Americas from Europe by the Atlantic Ocean served as deterrent enough. However, should the need arise, the states’ militias could be called to defend the country. Otherwise, they saw no harm in leaving military organization—the militia—to the control of the states.

The rifle, the primary weapon of defense and hunting, served as the instrument of the westward expansion. Pioneers used their firepower to provision their larder, and to attack and destroy the Native American populations who resisted this intrusion onto their traditional land. The image of the brave pioneer—bearing a musket rifle, powder horn and lead ball—became a fundamental part of the American psyche.

As the technology of weaponry improved, the killing became more efficient. Euro-Americans hunted the bison and Native Americans to near extinction.

Unlike other nations which grew through similar expansion—Canada, Australia, Japan, etc.—the American gun culture never outgrew its necessity or purpose in the United States. It continued into the modern world of 20^th and 21^st century America.

The Wild West Disappeared — The Spirit of the Wild West Never Did.

Weapon technology—driven by the Civil War and the growing American hegemony in the World Wars of the 20^th century—kept improving. Improvement in firing rates and killing ability grew exponentially. In our intervention in Vietnam, we were the world power imposing our will on a peasantry through superior weaponry and overwhelming firepower. The M-16 rifle, developed and deployed during the Vietnam War, gave rise to its civilian cousin—the AR-15—the weapon of choice used in so many of the mass shootings.

The Wild West disappeared, but the spirit of the Wild West never did. The American gun culture clung to these new weapons with the same enthusiasm as if still facing Indian raiding parties or starvation from failed hunting expeditions. Our unique fascination—almost to the point of irrationality—with possessing firearms prevails to this day, despite the dubious claims of necessity.

The United States Constitution’s Second Amendment

The language of the Second Amendment lends itself to a broad spectrum of interpretation. A strict absolutism mentality says the government can impose no restrictions on private ownership of firearms. But, a more literal reading interprets the second amendment to mean that firearms can be kept solely to support a “well-regulated” militia.

The courts have given little guidance which settles the matter consistently. Instead, it is a dog’s breakfast of conflicting and convoluted decisions and language. While the court upholds the government ban on private ownership of automatic weapons, sound suppressors or short-barreled shotguns, there are exceptions. The court often declines cases that offer the opportunity for more specific findings.

Much of the case law makes no distinction between a small caliber handgun with limited round capacity and slow reloading speed to a semi-automatic, high capacity, rapid firing, shoulder weapon with hyper-velocity rounds specifically designed to cause maximum damage to humans.

In US Supreme Court, District of Columbia v. Heller, the court struck down a District of Columbia statute restricting handgun possession citing 2^nd Amendment violations. The case did not garner a unanimous vote.

Justice Breyer (a Republican appointee) joined by Justices Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg, wrote a dissent which spells out the conditions under which government might place constitutional restrictions on possession of firearms. Breyer’s dissent said the Second Amendment protects “militia” related matters, and that the realities of the 18^th century made it necessary for civilians to keep firearms within their households.

Interpreting the U.S. Supreme Court Heller Decision

This interpretation does not prohibit the potential for using these weapons for self-defense purposes, but the amendment permitted this as it related to the protected militia functionality. There has not been a case with sufficient similarity granted certiorari before the court since, so the matter remains clouded even as the decision stands.

The argument most often raised by gun proponents is the protection of the people from the tyranny of government. This fails in several legal ways and one practical one. First, the separation of powers places controls over the power of the President to use military force without Congressional authority. The Posse Comitatus Act expressly prohibits the use of the military for civilian law enforcement except in times of rebellion.

To circumvent these restrictions, the three co-equal elements of government would need to cooperate in an unprecedented manner. That’s highly unlikely to happen. And that’s why America can’t effectively control guns.

From a purely practical perspective, 18^th and 19^th century Americans had comparable weapons to those in use by the military. That changed in the 20^th century. The reality is, regardless of the number of armed civilians, the chances of withstanding a direct, sustained attack by the US military is nil. The once dreaded “standing army” is not only standing, it is the most powerful military force in history. The Second Amendment was never intended to withstand a “standing” army with tactical nuclear weapons.

Guns in Private Hands for the Purpose of Personal and Public Protection

School shootings—or any mass casualty incident involving firearms—draw the most attention, but they constitute a small percentage of the death toll from guns. Suicides, criminal homicides and accidental shootings account for the overwhelming percentage of firearm-related deaths.

Often, opponents of gun control segregate these numbers, discounting suicides and accidental shootings as not germane to the discussion. They portray criminal homicides as solely attributable to those with a criminal record. It is simplistic and distorts the problem.

Another argument is to point to the murder rate in cities like Chicago with stringent gun laws and strong restrictions on issuing concealed carry permits. Again, this is a disingenuous argument. Chicago is a short drive to Indiana where gun laws are much less restrictive. A report by the FBI and the Chicago Police Department show most guns used in Chicago come from outside the city.

The problem lies in the complexity of the solution. One side sees eliminating all guns as a solution. The other sees more weapons in the hands of civilians as the solution.

Both are Wrong

The fundamental problem in crafting a practical solution is we have no in-depth, well-designed, peer-reviewed studies of the health risk of weapons. We have only anecdotal evidence—skewed by supporters and opponents—on the effectiveness of firearms as a means of self-protection. We have no clinical study of the related health risk of gun ownership. We have no data on the track of weapons in private commerce.

We need to evaluate the effect of single-parent—usually absent father—households on increasing risk factors for anti-social behavior in a clinical and reasoned manner. The commonality of a problematic childhood shared by school shooters is striking. It clamors for intense study.

We need to face the fact of our revolving door prison system, and the abrogation of government responsibility through the increasing use of private prisons. The self-fulfilling prophecy of prisons creating better criminals to keep the prisons full is a natural result of such a for-profit corrections system. Like sowing seeds for future crops, prison without rehabilitation is doomed to failing its primary purpose.

Efforts to prevent future Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland and Santa Fe incidents are hampered because we are blind, deaf and dumb. Our laws prevent the CDC, the ATF or the FBI from doing any meaningful tracking of firearms or their overall effect on security and health.

Therein Lays the First Step

To effectively control guns in America, we must remove the restrictions on studying the issue so we can formulate solutions based on facts and information rather than raw emotion. Until we have the facts about the efficacy of guns as an option for personal protection—or the net risk to the public from such policies—we cannot formulate rational solutions. Absent a concerted effort to study the problem dispassionately, we can never arrive at an effective, constitutionally-sound solution.

Until that happens, we are doomed to repeat history.

*** * ***

Thanks to retired East Providence, Rhode Island police captain and author, Joe Broadmeadow, for this rational, insightful and informative view of why America can’t effectively control guns.

Joe Broadmeadow retired with the rank of Captain from the East Providence, Rhode Island Police Department after twenty years. Assigned to various divisions within the department including Commander of Investigative Services, he also worked in the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force and on special assignment to the FBI Drug Task Force.

Collision Course and Silenced Justice, Joe’s first two novels, are from the highly-acclaimed Josh Williams series. Joe’s third mystery thriller, A Change of Hate, features one of the most popular characters from the first novels, Harrison “Hawk” Bennett, former special forces Green Beret and legendary criminal defense lawyer in a taut legal drama. The books continue to garner rave reviews, and are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in print, Kindle, and audio format.

Besides crime novels, Joe is developing a YA Fiction series. The first, Saving the Last Dragon, is available in Kindle, print, and audio versions. The next book, Raising the Last Dragon, is in development.

Joe also writes for two blogs, The Writing of Joe Broadmeadow (www.joebroadmeadowblog.com) and The Heretic and the Holy Man (www.thehereticandtheholyman.wordpress.com)

When Joe is not writing, he is hiking or fishing (and thinking about writing). Joe completed a 2,185-mile thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in September 2014. After completing the trail, Joe published a short story, Spirit of the Trail, available on Amazon.com in Kindle format.

Joe Broadmeadow lives in Lincoln, RI with his wife Susan. You can connect with Joe at:

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