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Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)

Pushkin Boston, January 1919 Giuseppe Jantoska stands at his kitchen window searching for his 10 year old son. All sorts of people come and go in Boston's North End, and Giuseppe likes to keep a close eye on little Pasquale, or Pasqualino, as he's affectionately known. At home, Giuseppe doesn't speak much English. Like many of their neighbours, the Antoscas hail from southern Italy. They're very poor. Even with Giuseppe's shifts at the Boston and Main Railroad back breaking work, laying track, they struggle to make ends meet. Fresh milk and meat are rarities in the Antosca house, and Giuseppe and his wife, Maria, worry about their six small children. Where is Pasqualino? Giuseppe surveys Commercial Street, a thoroughfare beneath his window that curves along the water. It's an unusually fine day for mid January and the harbour is bustling. Fishermen hurry to their lunch, a plate of spaghetti at home, perhaps, or a pie from Paziale's bakery. Dock workers shout as they unload shipping crates and horse drawn wagons hauling beer barrels mingle with peddlers carts. Motorized trucks rattle to and from the factories that ring the North End. Giuseppe scans the elevated railroad that swoops above Commercial street and the freight trains directly beneath it. Finally, he traces the hulking storage tank that dominates the wharf. His eyes flick to a tiny figure clad in red and crouching in the shadow of the high steel walls. Pasqualino Giuseppe breathes a sigh of relief. Down on the wharf, Pasquale Jantosca and his friends Tony and Maria d' Estasio are huddling beside the enormous storage tank. 50ft high and 90ft wide. Its grumbles and shudders and its sweet, earthy scent are familiar to them. The tank isn't designed to store diesel or grain, but of all things, a thick, dark, sugary liquid molasses. It pools around the base of the tank and the children like to play there, dodging stern railroad workers to scoot the sticky liquid into their pails and hurrying home with their syrupy treasure. But today, Pasqualino doesn't feel like playing. He knows his father's watching him. He's also very hot. Beneath his bright red knitwear is the second sweater his mother insisted he wear that morning. She fears him catching a cold. But the day's mild and the extra bulk also slows him down. As he gathers firewood, the tank groans, which isn't unusual. A fresh load of the sugary substance has recently arrived from the Caribbean. Pasqualino looks up at the massive container. 50 foot streams of molasses seep down its sides in long, treacly tears. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Arthur P. Gell had his work cut out. It was late 1914 and had been tasked with building an enormous molasses container near Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gel was assistant treasurer at the Purity Distilling Company, part of United States Industrial Alcohol, or usia. USIA processed molasses into alcohol for munitions like dynamite and smokeless powder. So when Europe went to war in 1914, the company had begun boosting production. Its plant in Cambridge was one of the largest in the country. But USIA struggled to keep up with demand. It didn't have its own storage facility, so it had to source its molasses from a broker in South Boston rather than directly from the Caribbean. This, in turn, ate into profits. To truly make hay while the sun shone, USIA needed its own tank. One that would be up and running by December 31, 1915. And it was decided that reliable, efficient Arthur Gell was the man for the job. The deadline was virtually impossible, but Gel's bosses had hinted that if he succeeded, a New York City promotion was on the cards. He was determined to give it his best shot. As Stephen Puglio explains in his book Dark Tide, Gel had spent his professional life in a range of clerical positions. An experienced administrator, he was confident that he knew the right people. He consulted other tank manufacturers about the appropriate factor of safety for a container like this one, and ordered steel plates to form the sides of the cylindrical structure. He also negotiated a lease for the perfect spot in Boston's North End. Here, steamships from the Caribbean could discharge the molasses and the sugary substance could then travel onto the Cambridge plant by rail car. Sure, the area was densely populated and there was a children's playground right next to the proposed tank site. But Gel knew that the residents of the North End were unlikely to resist the structure. Many of them were poor immigrants from Italy's south. They didn't speak English and kept to their own tight enclave. Their political participation was scant. All the same, lease negotiations were slow. By the time Jell had secured the location, it was September 1915 and the clock was ticking. Ever resourceful, he installed electric lighting at the wharf so that the construction crew could work through the night. But when a labourer fell inside the empty tank, Gel lost more time, so traumatised were the other workers by the dying man's screams. Then a superstorm blow lasted Boston and he lost a further two days. Gel couldn't afford any more embarrassing setbacks or expenses. When the time came to test the tank for leaks, he knew that they could only fill the massive structure by tapping into the municipal water supply. This would be time consuming and costly, so he came up with a solution. The crew ran six inches of water into the bottom of the container to just above the first joint at its base. If the first joint didn't leak, why would the rest of them? The tank held its 6 inches of water and Gel announced that it was ready. It was late December 1915. He had met his impossible deadline. Business boomed. From 1914 to 1916, USIA's net profit increased nearly ninefold. The investors were thrilled. In April 1917, the US declared war on Germany, and Gel was ready to show the managers in New York that Boston could rise to the challenge. That month, a munitions factory in Pennsylvania was bombed, the work of foreign employees who were angry about the war. Italian anarchists were said to be behind other similar bombings. Gel took note and increased security at the Boston tank. A couple of weeks later, Gel ran into another complication. A man called Isaac Gonzales burst into his Cambridge office, uninvited and unapproved. Gonzalez was also a USIA employee, the assistant to the caretaker at the Boston tank, and he was raving about some Leaks in the structure. Apparently the tank oozed gallons of molasses onto the wharf. Everyone had noticed, and children even liked to play with it. Gonzalez shoved tiny pieces of steel into Jell's hands and said that rusty flecks dropped into his hair each time he entered the tank. Gel did his best to keep calm. This man was clearly paranoid, even obsessed. Molasses had a life of its own, and leaks were normal, especially in a relatively new structure and especially after a fresh shipment. Plus, Jell had had the tank resealed so he knew it was being maintained. He told Gonzales that he needed to do a better job of keeping the neighbourhood children away from company property. That would shut him up, he thought. It didn't shut him up. Next, Gonzales revealed he'd been sleeping at the tank so that he could sound the alarm should it start to fall. Gel was disturbed. Company employees should be returning home after work. The tank still stands. The tank will stand, he snapped. Then he sent the man on his way, promising to fire him if he breathed another word of this nonsense. Yes, Arthur Jell was a reliable, efficient man. Nothing would hinder productivity on his watch. Not saboteurs with bombs, and certainly not some jumped up manual laborer. Isaac Gonzalez returned to his post through 1917 and 1918. Other Bostonians muttered to him about the tank. The men of Engine 31 firehouse, which stood just along the wharf, commented on the obvious leaks that streaked its sides and the strange sounds it made. When another local worker pressed his back against the tank, he told Isaac it felt as though the steel walls were moving, pulsing in and out with the flow of the liquid inside. Gonzales continued his nighttime vig in secret, of course. He knew he couldn't speak to Jell again. But in 1918, he complained to his superintendent, William White. He waited to see if his bosses would do anything. They did. In August, a crew arrived at the tank, paint in hand. Jell had ordered them to daub the grey steel walls with a dark red brown, the color of molasses. Gonzalez had had enough. He quit his job and joined the army. Cautionary tales will return.

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Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)

USIA had done well after the war in Europe, but when the armistice was signed in November 1918, it faced a steep fall in profits. Assistant Treasurer Arthur Gell knew all too well that the investors wouldn't be happy. But all was not lost. As the United States looked To ratify the 18th Amendment of the Constitution, USIA spotted a slim window of opportunity. The prohibition of the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors wouldn't actually go into effect for another year, during which time there would surely be a spike in alcohol sales. USIA resolved to repurpose its distilleries for the liquor industry. It would once again make hay while the sun shone. On January 12, 1919, a ship cruised into Boston Harbour with 1.3 million gallons of molasses. The dark, viscous liquid had been warmed to facilitate its transfer, and it flowed easily into the tank. By next morning, the container was very nearly full. It held 2.3 million gallons of the sticky substance, weighing roughly 26 million pounds. The weather in Boston had been bitterly cold, and when the warm, free flowing molasses topped up the colder, thicker liquid already in the tank, something unexpected happened. The introduction of all that additional heat accelerated a fermentation process, producing carbon dioxide. The gas had nowhere to go, and it began to push against the steel walls of the tank. USIA's only responsibility, as the company saw it, was to maximise profit. Somehow that always seemed to mean profit now rather than profit later. And so Arthur Gell prioritised speed, growth and quarterly returns. If that sounds familiar, it could be because Silicon Valley has become famous or infamous for a similar corporate logic. Facebook's motto was move fast and break things, and it became the tech world's battle cry. A move fast and break things culture can encourage innovation and banish fear of mistakes. After all, errors are par for the course, especially when you're making something new. And while slow and steady can bring small, consistent benefits to a business, throwing caution to the wind might generate a single massive payoff. But when a corporation values efficiency and growth above all all else, there can be other consequences. Environmental costs, community welfare and workers rights fall by the wayside. Safeguards are eroded, accountability dissolves, and harm is written off as a cost of doing business. January 15, 1919, is a cloudy day in Boston, but unusually mild. The weather has been punishingly cold of late, and the people of the North End take advantage of the slight thaw. At lunchtime, the harbour is abuzz. Workers eat their lunch on front steps and chatter on sidewalks. The mood is mellow. Tank superintendent William White. White has just received a phone call from his wife. She has her eye on a new dress and wants to go shopping together. It'll be a quiet work day now that the new load of molasses has been safely delivered and White sees no reason not to spoil her. Just before midday, he leaves his post. If he'd lingered, he might. You might have noticed Pasquale Antosca and the d' Estacio children sneaking onto the wharf to collect firewood. Instead, a railroad worker begins scolding Maria d'. Estasio. You shouldn't be here, he chides. This isn't a playground. Just along the wharf, the men of the Engine 31 firehouse are playing whist on their lunch break, smoking their pipes and mocking Babe Ruth's ridiculous demands for a pay rise. The baseball star would never survive on a firefighter's wage, they scoff. 56 year old John Barry, the stone cutter for the City of Boston's street department, has joined them from his workshop next door. Burly and muscular, Barry is physically formidable. But his friends at the firehouse know that his 10 children are never far from his thoughts. What was that? It sounded like thunder. One of the firefighters scrambles to a window. His face darkens with fear. Oh my God. He cries.

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Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)

At his kitchen window, Giuseppe Jantoska jumps back in horror. He's been following his Pasqualino as he gathers firewood, tracing that bright red sweater as it bobs along the grey wharf. But something has just swallowed the little boy. A kind of dark, gleaming wave pushing forwards, tearing towards Commercial Street. Kitchen growls and shakes, and before he can move, Giuseppe's been thrown to the floor. He hits his head. Everything goes black. At a call box on Commercial street, policeman Frank McManus is making a routine report to headquarters. That chilling sound, somewhere between a thunderclap and a sickening scraper of metal, makes him turn, receiver still, to his mouth. He can't quite believe what he's seeing, but he manages to utter a few shocked words to the dispatcher. Send all available rescue vehicles and personnel immediately. There's a wave of molasses coming down Commercial Street. What follows is the stuff of nature. Nightmares. The tank has burst clean open, rivets screaming through the air like shrapnel. A worker trapped in the railroad freight office saw the tank's steel walls fly into other buildings, which crumpled like eggs. 2.3 million gallons of molasses has rushed onto the wharf. A syrupy tsunami, 35ft high, 160ft wide, and traveling at 35 miles per hour. It snuffs out the daylight and wrenches the firehouse from its foundations. On Commercial street, in the dining room of his second floor apartment, Robert Burnett hears a swish like the rushing of wind. A shadow falls across the room and he hurries to the window. A great black wave is bearing down on the house. Burnett snatches at his front door. The wave is already surging up the stairs. In the hallway, he slams the door and runs for the roof. The wave wall of molasses rebounds off buildings, shattering windows and pulverizing brickwork. It twists and snaps the steel girders of the elevated railroad, obliterating the track for more than 100ft. Horses, carts and motor trucks are overturned. Children and adults vanish from the treacly delug. Stone cutter John Barry lies in total darkness, wood and metal crushing his back. It's agony. He can barely breathe. When the wave of molasses ripped the firehouse off its foundations, the building collapsed and the treacherous syrup seeped through the debris. Barry is trapped, pinned face down, one cheek grinding into molasses. Only his left arm is free and he clears the vile liquid from his face as best he can. Barry tries to call out, to scream, but his voice is thin and reedy. He imagines foul rats scuttling over his body, burrowing their yellow teeth into his flesh. I'm going to die here, he thinks. He wonders what will become of his 10 children. On his kitchen floor, Giuseppe Jantoska comes to his wife. Maria is crying in the corner of the room. One of their daughters is comforting her. Bruised, stunned, Giuseppe pulls himself up and goes shakily to the front door. He will find Pasqualino if it kills him. Cautionary Tales will be back shortly.

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Tim Harford (Narrator of Cautionary Tales)

In the first moments of the disaster, the molasses flowed through the streets of Boston like water or Perhaps like ketchup being jiggled out of a bottle. Like ketchup, molasses flows freely when being violently shaken. And exploding out of a high pressure tank is certainly a violent movement. But when molasses cools, it thickens. On January 15, the temperature in Boston had climbed a little, but the winter air was still much cooler than the syrupy liquid. And as it flowed out of the tank and through the streets, it began to slow and congeal like quicksand. It trapped its victims, as the Boston Post explained, snared in its flood was to be stifled. Once it smeared a head, human or animal, there was no coughing off the sticky mass. To attempt to wipe it with hands was to make it worse. It plugged the nostrils almost airtight. Horses thrashed around in the gluey mass like so many flies on sticky flypaper. They couldn't be freed and were shot dead. At a local relief station, nurses and orderlies streaked with molasses treated the injured. They carried patients on sticky stretchers, cut away clothing and cleaned gaping wounds. Anguished Bostonians clamored to know if their missing relatives were there. A lucky few were relatively unscathed. Five year old Albert Janci had been picked up by the wave and drenched in molasses, but was miraculously unhurt. Once he'd been cleaned up and had something to eat, he was allowed to return home. Others were taken straight to the local morgue. In the ruins of the firehouse, John Barry's back seared with pain. Despite his incredible strength, he couldn't move. He couldn't see anything either. It was pitch black, but he could hear something with the shred of energy he had left. He strained his ears. There it was again. A man's voice. He wasn't alone down here. His friends were imprisoned with him in the debris. And then John Barry heard something else. The unmistakable sound of saws on wood and metal yielding to flame. Someone knew they were down there. Someone was coming to get them. Giuseppe Jantoska spent hours searching for Pasqualina, but to no avail. Maria Distasio had been found. She'd been right in the path of the monstrous wave and had suffocated immediately. But her brother Tony had survived. He'd been thrown against a lamppost and suffered a fractured skull. But a firefighter had managed to pull him from the morass before he drowned. Could Giuseppe's boy have been rescued? Had he been swept into the harbour? Or perhaps he was trapped beneath the debris on the wharf? In broken English, Giuseppe frantically questioned the dazed and injured along Commercial Street. But no one had seen a little boy in a red sweater. Firefighters had rallied to reach their trapped colleagues from Engine 31. Chopping and digging through the wreckage was perilous work. With every move they made, the remains of the building shifted around them. They found some of their fellows in time, but 34 year old father of three, George Leahy was dragged from the wreckage, dead. After three hours and as many injections of morphine into his back, John Barry heard a saw slicing away at the wood near his head. It was getting closer and closer. And then quite suddenly, it stopped and he felt the great weight be heaved from his back. The exhausted stonecutter was lifted onto a stretcher and rushed to hospital. When his stricken daughters reached the ward, they didn't recognize him. Their powerful father had vanished. In his place was a fragile old man. Arthur Jell visited the waterfront. He was aghast at the devastation, but kept calm. There would be a plausible explanation for the disaster, one that absolved USIA and himself of any responsibility. In the days that followed the flood, the cleanup operation began. Businesses had been decimated and the harbour police picked all sorts of objects out of the water. Rolls of cloth, barrels of ale, tubs of lard. Firemen spread sand on the pavements and dispersed the tenacious molasses with jets of salt water. On January 17, USIA issued a statement. The company knew beyond question that the tank was not weak. This calamity was the work of an outside influence. It was another three days before Giuseppe and Maria Jantoska learned the fate of their son. Rescue workers pulled the body of a little boy in a red sweater from the wreckage. A railroad car carried 50ft by the wave had crushed him into a wall. Giuseppe was asked to identify the child. He was slicked with molasses and his face was horribly disfigured. Weeping, Giuseppe lifted his red sweater and saw a second sweater underneath. His heart breaking, he gathered Pasqualino's tiny body in his arms and hugged him close. One hundred and fifty people were injured in the molasses flood and 21 people lost their lives. It was months before all the bodies were recovered. At the inquest into the disaster, Judge Wilfred Bolster rebuked usia, but he was also scathing about the Boston Buildings Department. The city had bypassed the proper permit procedures. No one in the Buildings Department had been qualified to assess whether the steel structure was fit for purpose and they'd accepted the paper design simply because it bore the name of a civil engineer. This single accident has cost more in material damage than all, all the supposed economies in the building department laws are cheap of passage, costly of enforcement. They do not execute themselves, Bolster declared. Despite Judge Bolster's rebuke, a grand jury found that there was insufficient evidence to return an indictment of manslaughter. The people of Boston were appalled. USIA was getting away with it. A group of Bostonians prepared to sue the company. If nobody would go to jail for their carelessness, they could at least be made to pay a price. But USIA had some tricks up its sleeve. Today it's generally believed that the Boston molasses disaster was the result of brittle fracture, the sudden catastrophic failure of the tank structure due to poor design. To withstand the strains they would experience, the tank walls needed to be at least twice as thick. Over time, as the tank was repeatedly emptied and refilled, the steel fatigued. The fatal fracture probably began as a circular hatch at the base of the tank. Engineers balance efficiency, resource allocation and safety. Arthur Gell, who oversaw the tank's rapid construction, was a skilled administrator, but he wasn't an engineer. His focus wasn't the complex harmony of function and long term public safety, but short term profit. USIA regarded the residents of Boston's North End as not as vulnerable individuals worthy of dignity, but as factors in a business model. The company had taken advantage of a power imbalance, knowing that the Italian Americans who lived near the harbour were unlikely to resist the building of the molasses tank. USIA also knew that people were suspicious of Italian Americans and in its next move, it sought to capitalise on that fear. In the wake of the disaster, 119 Bostonians sued USIA, arguing that the great vat of molasses had been structurally deficient and built without proper safeguards. Former caretaker Isaac Gonzales, who'd warned Arthur Jell about the tank and been dismissed, took the stand and told of how molasses had oozed incessantly through the tank's riveted joins. John Barry, his hair now white from the stress of his ordeal, also testified he could no longer work as a stone cutter because he couldn't stand up straight. My back hurts all the time, he said. It's as though my spine is breaking. The doctor says there's no cure. Giuseppe Jantosca described the earth shattering moment. His Pasqualino was engulfed by a dark wave. USIA countered that Pascuale Antosca shouldn't have been there at all. A company is under no obligation to to make its premises safe for trespassers, snarled one defence attorney. USIA held that at lunchtime on January 15, 1919, unknown anarchists, probably Italian, had dropped a bomb in the tank. The company had spent more than $50,000 on expert witnesses to support its claims. It continued to take this line even after a professor from MIT testified that the tank had been of insufficient thickness to withstand the pressure of the molasses. Inside auditor Hugh Ogden listened to nearly a thousand witnesses and heard over 20,000 pages of testimony. The proceedings took five years, but in the end he rejected USIA's claims of sabotage. I cannot help feeling that a proper regard for the appalling possibility of damage to persons and property contained in the tank in case of accident demanded a higher standard of care in inspection from those in authority, ogden declared. He recommended that the plaintiffs receive damages. A private agreement was reached, and in 1925 USIA took a charge against profits of $628,000 due to the Boston tank accident, about $11.5 million today. That's not nothing but split between 119 traumatized and grievously injured plaintiffs. It's also not very much. USIA closed its Cambridge plant and fired the people that worked there. But Arthur P. Jell seems to have got his New York City promotion. He took the vice presidency at another USIA subsidiary, the American Solvents and Chemical Association. Gel remained a company man through and through. In 1931, he was named in a federal grand jury indictment against USIA for violating Prohibition laws. He died in 1963 at the ripe old age of 84, survived by his wife, daughter and four grandchildren. Isaac Gonzales had warned Jell about the tank, and when his warnings had been repeatedly ignored, he'd quit and joined the Army. After the war, he faced yet another test of his courage. He scaled a burning building to rescue a woman and her three small children, wrapping them in bedclothes and carrying them out. When they were safe. He returned to the blazing apartment just in case anyone had been left behind. The fire cut his exit off and he had to jump to safety from an upper window. Gonzalez was a hero, but it's hard not to wonder if his time at the molasses tank might have left him with some survivor's guilt. If only Arthur Gell had felt the same sense of responsibility. The key source for this episode of Cautionary Tales is Dark Tide, the Great Boston molasses flood of 1919 by Stephen Puglio. For a full list of sources, see the show notes@timharford.com Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio. Ben Nadaff Haffrey edited the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference to us. And if you want to hear the show ad free and get access to exclusive content, sign up to the cautionary Club that is over at patreon.com cautionaryclub sa.

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