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History | Politics | Science
The Worst Non-Water Flood Disaster in History
This is a true story and one of the strangest.
It was 1917 and the world was on fire.
Purity Distilling was ramping up production.
The government needed more alcohol for military manufacturing. Most people don’t realize that alcohol is used to make TNT and smokeless gunpowder. At the time, the US was going through millions of lbs of smokeless gunpowder during World War I.
And so began the construction of a massive, massive storage tank in downtown Boston (you can guess where this is going).
The container was 50 feet tall and 90 feet wide:
They didn’t have proper engineers on the site to survey it and stick to safety standards. Leaks tend to happen at joints in material, where you connect one panel to another (this is true with walls/ceilings in homes too).
At one point, molasses (which is distilled to make rum) was seen leaking from several cracks in the tank. The builders patched the holes with special caulking. Then, they painted the tank brown…
