Strange things happen. Fish sometimes fall from the sky. Unexplained lights perform strange maneuvers in the night sky. Children claim to 'remember' past lives. While all of these must be taken with more than a modicum of suspicion, there are strange occurrences in history which are without a doubt real and actual events. The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 is one such event. Be careful. Though you might be tempted to laugh at the idea of a flood of molasses as  ludicrous and unbelievable, the series of tragic events that took place on January 15, 1919 left twenty-one people dead and a score of people injured. As strange and as sickeningly sweet as it sounds, Boston experienced the world's only known disaster caused by a sugar by-product.

Molasses was a staple food in colonial New England. Slave ships emptied their cargo in the West Indies and filled their holds with barrels of molasses and then headed to the colonies. Sugar was one of the most expensive staples in the colonial pantry, so molasses was a welcome and much less expensive alternative. Colonists used it in the production of beer and rum and you cannot have true New England Baked Beans, brown bread or pumpkin pie without it.

Most people are unaware that molasses had a very important role to play during wartime and it had nothing to do with food. As any home brewer will tell you, sugar and yeast together create something very powerful: alcohol. Ships from Cuba, Puerto Rico and other islands in the West Indies would dock and pump out thousands of gallons to later be carried by rail car to the Purity plant in Cambridge where it underwent the process of conversion to industrial alcohol. Then, the alcohol could be used in the mass manufacture of munitions and explosives, adding to the war effort and making a lot of money for the United States Industrial Alcohol Company. Since the outbreak of war in 1914, overseas demand for alcohol had strained domestic resources and the British, the Canadian and the French governments could not get enough. With a paltry twenty percent of the molasses shipped to American converted into rum, a whopping 80 percent of the substance was turned into a major ingredient of weaponry, especially of dynamite, smokeless powder and other explosives.

In order to facilitate the collection and distribution of the molasses, the company built a massive holding tank, fifty feet high and ninety feet in diameter capable of holding as much as 2,300,000 gallons of molasses. The tank stood in the North End, near Boston Harbor and the historic section of town that housed the Old North Church and Paul Revere's House. The tank was very to close the Copp's Hill Burying Ground and Commercial Street. It was one of the largest structures in the area and it towered over many houses and commercial buildings in the area, always in the background.

It was built the same way that metal ships like the Titanic were built at the time with sheet steel and rivets overlapping at the edges. Like the Titanic, the Boston tank had a major flaw in the steel common to all steel manufactured in the early part of the century: it was made with very little manganese, an element that strengthens steel making it capable of withstanding great pressure without cracking.

From the very beginning, people became used to seeing the dark brown stain of molasses running down from rivet holes all over the structure. Children would be dispatched with containers to visit the plant and collect as much of the run-off as they could. Though most of the people who actually lived in the area were Italian immigrants and therefore out of the mainstream of Boston life, it became a problem for the company that owned the tank. They did not want word to spread that there was a problem with it. Something had to be done.

In their wisdom, the people at the US Industrial Alcohol Company found a way to fix the issue: they ordered the structure to be painted a molasses brown, so the leaks could ea