Sticky Business: The Boston Molasses Flood

In the early afternoon of January 15, 1919, a fifty-foot steel tank filled with over two million gallons of molasses collapsed in Boston's North End sending its sticky contents in a fifteen-foot wave through the neighborhood streets.  The disaster was blamed on immigrant anarchists.  The event knocked Prohibition and the end of World War I out of the headlines and resulted in a huge civil law suit that was not resolved until 1925.