The nice thing about history is that it’s full of all kinds of weird, wonderful, whimsical little things that nobody thinks about, knows about, cares about or reads about. Events of great interest and fascination which you’d only stumble across by accident and which, once you have, find incredibly fascinating or strange and unique. Here is just a handful of natural and manmade disasters which, though famous in their own times, in some cases comparable to 9/11, are barely remembered today…

The Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

An early newspaper-report about the flood. The number of dead and wounded would soon rise to 21 and 150, respectively

The 15th of January, 1919 started out like any other in the city of Boston, Massachusetts, on the USA’s east coast. Paper-boys made their rounds, milk and ice were delivered, people went to work. But today, and indeed, the next four days, would be shaken by an event so catastrophic, so weird and so…sweet…that Bostonians still think about it today.

In the northern end of Boston’s downtown area were the facilities belonging to the Purity Distilling Company; a manufactury of alcohol and other, alochol-related products. One of the things that the Distillery produced was molasses, which was then the main sweetener in the United States, as opposed to honey or maple-syrup. On this particular day, the 15th of January, 1919, a 50ft (approx 16.5m) high tank of molasses collapsed, spilling its sweet ooze all over town. It is possible that the molasses was overheated due to the unseasonably warm January temperatures that day, which caused the rivets on the huge molasses tank to rupture. Passers-by who saw the start of the disaster described hearing the rivets ripping out of the metal sides of the tank like machine-gun bullets, followed by the intense vibrations of the collapsing molasses tank.

What followed was a tidal-wave of dark ooze, up to 15ft (4.5 meters) high and travelling up to 35mph (56km/h). The force of the molasses wave created widespread destruction throughout downton Boston. Twenty-one people were killed in the sticky surge and up to a hundred and fifty people were injured! The power of the wave destroyed buildings, swept people off their feet, flipped automobiles over like toys and laid waste to several city blocks!

The force of the molasses impact was such that it ripped out support-girders holding up a length of Boston’s elevated railway and even derailed a train travelling along that stretch of track at the time! A truck travelling along a nearby road was blasted off the street by the force of the wave, sending it flying into the nearby Charles River. When the wave of molasses was over, streets were drenched, cars were buried, people were covered in ooze and survivors and would-be rescuers alike, waded through waist-deep molasses up to three feet (1m) thick! People who died in the disaster were mostly drowned by the fast-moving molasses or were killed by debris which became speeding missiles, forced down the streets of Boston at terrific speeds.

The first rescuers on the scene were 116 cadets from the training-ship USS Nantucket, which was docked in the Charles River at the time. Under the command of Lieutenant-Commander H.J. Copeland, the cadets fanned out through the ooze, forming a human barrier to keep back the gathering crowds and to help organise rescue-efforts. The cadets were soon joined by members of the Boston Police Department, the American Red Cross, the United States Army and more sailors and personnel from other nearby naval ships docked around Boston. The rescue and cleanup efforts took several weeks. Doctors and nurses set up aid-stations and rescuers, from soldiers, sailors, Red Cross volunteers and Boston policemen combed the area looking for drowned victims. In a substance almost as black as ink, as thick as honey and up to waist-depth in the deepest areas…you can bet this wasn’t an easy task!

A photograph of the aftermath of the Boston Molasses Flood. Note the destroyed buildings and the rescue-cars and trucks parked in the lower half of the picture

Once all the survivors had been found and the bodies had been located, Bostonians started the long and sticky process of cleaning up the mess. Molasses was swept, pushed and shoved aside. Buildings were hosed down, cars were relocated, righted and cleaned and entire streets and sidewalks had to be scrubbed, scraped and hosed down to remove the sticky substance entirely. The environmental impact of the molasses flood was immense, and it took a full six months before the Charles River and Boston Harbor were cleared of the molasses.

The United States Industrial Alcohol Company, which owned the Purity Distilling Company, were found guilty in court and the company was forced to pay $600,000 in damages (1919 dollars. $6.6million today).

The exact cause of the disaster was never fully established and varies between the tank being overfilled to excessive fermentation that caused a buildup of gasses which exploded due to a stress-fracture compromising the tank’s strength. Another possibility was that it was the generally poor construction of the tank itself and that the rivets failed due to improper application.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911

Widely considered one of, if not the biggest industrial disaster fire in the New York City Area, the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911 showed just how dangerously ill-equipped most buildings in New York City were, to combat fires, and this disaster constantly reminds people to exercise and install proper fire-safety devices and equipment in their buildings and to have planned escape-routes in an emergency.

‘Shirtwaist’ is an old term for a woman’s blouse. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a company that occupied the top three floors (eighth, ninth and tenth) of the Asch Building in New York City, which was (and still is) located on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place. In these three floors, the company’s main employees, immigrant women, worked in gruelling, sweatshop conditions. The rooms were hot and stuffy, filled with poor migrants who worked nine hours a day five days a week and seven hours a day on Saturdays, producing shirtwaists, cutting the fabric, sewing the blouses and stacking them up to be transported off to the warehouses and shops.

The 25th of May, 1911 was a Saturday and like all good people, the women of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory wanted to finish their work and get home. Knock-off time was five o’clock, but over a hundred of these women would never go home to their families.

Although smoking was illegal in the factory due to the highly flammable cotton fabric which the women worked with, it’s widely believed that an improperly-discarded cigarette set the building on fire. A worker is believed to have thrown her cigarette into a rubbish-bin under one of the work-tables without checking that it was properly extinguished first. The embers in the cigarette set the dry, flammable scraps of cotton on fire and soon, the entire table was up in flames. Newspaper journalists later theorised that an electrical fault was to blame, but this was never firmly established. Whatever the cause, the fire rapidly took hold in the stuffy and overcrowded workspace, filled with wood from the tables, sewing-machine oil and the cotton cuttings from the shirtwaists and within minutes, the entire eighth floor of the Asch Building was on fire.

At once, women began to panic. They rushed for the elevators, they broke windows, they ran down stairs and they tried to scramble out onto the fire-escape ladders, balconies and escape-stairs which New York buildings had to have secured to the sides of their structures, to provide an escape-route in the event of an emergency.

A bookkeeper with access to a telephone managed to contact the women on the 10th floor that the building was on fire, however, the lack of a proper alarm-system meant that it was impossible to contact the women on the ninth floor in between.

There were numerous ways out of the Asch building: There were two elevator-shafts, a staircase and a pair of fire-escape staircases on the outside of the building, one descending to Greene Street and one descending to Washington Square.

The Asch Building, shortly after the fire

Women charged towards the Greene Street stairs. Kicking down the emergency-exit doors, they rushed out onto the balconies and started heading down towards the street. In the panic, there was no-one to regulate the flow of human traffic and before long, the severely overloaded staircase (which was already probably in bad repair) twisted and collapsed under the weight of its escapees. The door to the Washington Square stairs was locked and women on the 9th floor had no way of accessing it. By the time they knew the building was on fire, the Greene Street stairs were already blocked off by flames and smoke. After finally gaining access to the other stairs via the roof, more women were able to get out that way.

The building’s two elevator-operators, Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillalo operated their two freight-elevator cars as quickly and as efficiently as it was safe to do so. While the building still had electrical power, the two men rode their elevators up to the ninth floor, taking down packed lifts with each journey to the 7th floor where women could run down stairs to safety in the streets.

Eventually, though, the fire put the elevators out of action. Warped by heat and strained by the immense loads, the elevator mechanisms seized up until they became wholly inoperable, forcing the elevator-operators to abandon their posts after a total of just six journeys.

This horse-drawn fire-engine was photographed by a passer-by as it dashed towards the scene of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

With the stairs impassable to all but the bravest women, with the fire-escape stairs either inaccessable or having collapsed and with the only two elevators within reach put out of action, there was little else that the other women in the building could do to escape. There was no water on these upper levels of the Asch Building for the ladies to fight the flames with. Some broke windows with furniture and jumped out of the top three floors, falling several dozen feet to their deaths in the street below.

The New York City Fire Department acted swiftly in the Triangle Shirtwaist disaster. Horse-drawn fire-engines were on the scene in minutes, with ladders, firefighters and powerful, coal-fired, steam-powered water-pumps. Despite their speed and efficiency, the firefighters were unable to combat the blaze effectively. No ladders that they possessed at the time, would reach beyond the 6th floor. In the meantime, more desperate women were jumping out the windows.

A rather poor photograph, but in all that pixelation are the bodies of just forty of the 146 victims that the fire claimed

While most of the 146 victims of the fire were women, witnesses say there were least thirty men who were killed in the fire as well. Deaths in the fire were caused by burns, smoke inhalation or blunt-impact trauma, suffered from the falls to the sidewalk. When the fire was over and the bodies had been cleared away, the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory were brought to trial. They were eventually acquitted at the criminal trial, but lost a civil suit in 1913. Mark Blanck and Isaac Harris, the company’s owners, were forced to pay $75 compensation to the families of each of the victims (which was a considerable sum of money in 1911). Mr. Blanck was arrested again a few years later for endangering the lives of his workers when he locked doors during working-hours, in another one of his factories, which the authorities considered to be wreckless and needlessly endangering lives. The American Society of Safety Engineers, whose job it was to check the fire-safety of all buildings, was formed shortly after the disaster on the 14th of October, 1911.

The Asch Building today

The 1945 Empire State Building Plane Crash

On the morning of the 11th of September, 2001, the world was shocked when two fully-loaded 747 jumbo-jet airliners crashed into thw Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing thousands of people.

But how many people also know that a plane crashed into another equally-famous New York City skyscraper over fifty years before?

It’s true! On the morning of the 28th of July, 1945, weeks before the end of WWII, a US Airforce plane, a B-25, crashed into the top of the Empire State Building!

A B-25 Mitchell bomber, the type of plane that hit the Empire State Building

At around 9:00am on the 28th of July, a Saturday, A B-25 Mitchell bomber was flying to New York City. Piloting the plane was Lieut. Col. William Franklin Smith Jnr. He had two passengers with him, who were on a routine flight from Boston to New York. The day was incredibly foggy and Smith had contacted LaGuardia Airport, requesting permission to land. Air-Traffic Control at LaGuardia warned Smith about the incredibly low visibility due to the fog over New York City at the time and advised him to wait, if he could, until the fog had cleared a bit. Smith disregarded this advice and headed to the airport anyway. Severely disorientated by the fog, Smith’s co-ordination soon went out the window…along with much else!

Trying to use the skyscrapers of Manhattan to navigate, Smith made a wrong turn after passing the Crysler Building and suddenly found himself heading straight towards the Empire State Building! Unable to stop or change directions, Smith crashed into the north side of the Empire State Building, hitting it on the 79th floor, but damaging not only that one, but also the 80th and 78th! The impact-time was 9:40am. Fourteen people were killed in the crash: Smith, his two passengers, and eleven office-workers inside the building at the time of the impact. The fire which resulted from the airplane fuel was put out forty minutes later while firefighters and paramedics attempted to treat the injured.

A photograph of the Empire State Building, taken shortly after the crash. Note the flames coming out of the windows on the upper floors

Now here’s a Guiness World Record…How far can you freefall in an elevator without killing yourself?

This dubious and terrifying honour goes to elevator-operator Betty-Lou Oliver. The impact of the bomber against the Empire State Building had severely damaged and weakened the elevator which she was in at the time of the crash. Unaware of this, rescuers tried to help the already injured Oliver out of the building via the elevator. The weakened cables snapped and Betty freefell 75 storeys to solid earth below! Although badly burned by the fire from the original crash and suffering horrible injuries from the impact of the elevator crashing into the end of the shaft, Oliver survived and was taken to hospital. She returned to work a few months later.