Short Stuff: Boston Molasses Flood

00:00:04 Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I should say, hey, and welcome to the short stuff. No. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's sitting in for Dave. So this is short stuff. That was kind of tasteless, even though it's been more than 100 years. Yeah, crazy. It's still, I think this is sometimes taken too lightly or expressed too lightly. It's a pretty big tragedy that we're about to talk about. 00:00:29 Speaker 2: That's right. The 1919 Boston molasses flood that I was positive we'd covered. And it had to be on a when we made those dumb videos back in the day. Not don't be dumb. Those were good videos. All the other ones were dumb, ironically. 00:00:44 Speaker 1: No, thanks, man. Enough people had have written in over the years to ask us for it. That that's where I've heard of it. I don't remember talking about it. 00:00:55 Speaker 2: We had to have it. I looked it up just to make sure, but stuff you missed in history class back in the day covered it. But this is our shorty version. And so we'll take you back. Let's hop in the Wayback Machine. It's been a minute. 00:01:05 Speaker 1: Oh, let's do it. 00:01:06 Speaker 2: It is so dusty and it sounds funny, but let's crank it up. 00:01:10 Speaker 1: Look out for that spider. That's pretty big. 00:01:12 Speaker 2: That's a pretty big spider. But it came from the Mesozoic era, so. 00:01:18 Speaker 1: Yeah, that explains why. 00:01:20 Speaker 2: That explains why. So we're going to go back to January 15th, 1919 to Boston. to the north end of Boston, to Commercial Street in the north end. It's a pretty warm day for January, so there's a lot of people out and about trying to get a little bit of sun. And everyone is hearing a weird sound. Some people say it sounds like gunfire. Some people it sounds like a train, like a rumbling of the L train. And when you look up, all of a sudden, you see a 2.3 million gallon wave, 25 feet high and 160 feet wide, coming at us at 35 miles an hour. 00:01:58 Speaker 1: Can you imagine? 00:01:59 Speaker 2: No, sir. I can't imagine a water wave like that. 00:02:03 Speaker 1: No, I know. And that's the thing. Like, there's a couple of different properties about this that make it way worse than a wave of water. And one is that molasses is denser than water. So the effect it has when it slams into you is going to be even worse than when water does. And two, after it slams into you and takes you under... it's going to start to solidify and congeal once it stops moving. And you're going to have a lot of trouble getting out of it. And so that happened to a lot …