Boston to honor victims of the Great Molasses Flood in ceremony at the site

Dark Tide was an interesting and intriguing read -- you have trouble "puting it down"

However, we really don't know all of the factors involved from a forensic engineering perspective. Many engineering disasters found to be the result of a mixture of mistakes and lack of knowledge by those designing, fabricating, operating and maintaining buildings, bridges, ships, aircraft, tunnels, etc. Sometimes all of this is coupled with malice and just plain natural events. For example someone leaves out some washers in the installation of a glass bridge in a hotel lobby and then years later someone else allows dancing to occur on the inadequately supported bridge-- Booom!!.

Just like the Titanic where in addition to the iceberg there were metallurgical issues -- so too in the case of the Molasses Tank. Both events happened in a early 20th C , a time before x-ray /, gamma ray and ultrasound inspection of welds, etc.no scanning electron microscopes to peer into the crystal structure of the metal] a time when metallurgical forensics was more about following [or lack of following] "rules of thumb." -- for example there was no way to look beyond a conventional microscope at the crystal structure of the steel to see how it had responded under stress..

In both the Molasses and Titanic events --- Temperatures both inside and ambient played a role in how the metals reacted to the stresses with which the Tank and the Titanic were subjected

So was safety margin shaving involved in the design, fabrication and operation of the Molasses Tank -- most probably -- though unprovably.so

It probably wasn't the best location for the tank -- right in the midst of the most densely populated part of Boston. Had the tank be constructed in the South Boston Seaport about where the Bank of [evolving paradigm name] Pavilion is located -- there would have been some sticky railroad tracks, possibly some sheds destroyed -- but probably no loss of life

Still All-in-All -- a uniquely Boston event what with all the direct and indirect historic references and such

I find that photo of the elevated train passing by the tank especially creepy: The smallish wooden house immediately to the left of the train was the Clougherty house. Mrs. Clougherty was killed when the upper stories of the house collapsed on the first floor, where she was when the tank burst. Nothing has ever been built on the site; it's now a small parking lot for the adjacent brick buildings. I think the building at right, with the mansard roof, was the Public Works building where five men died; the fire station, where George Leahy drowned, is just out of view to the right.