The Molasses Flood

Lyrics

[Intro]
(rivets creaking, a long metallic groan, and then the sound of something enormous giving way)
Boston. The North End. January fifteenth, nineteen nineteen. Midday.

[Verse 1]
The tank is fifty feet high and holds two and a half million gallons,
and it has leaked since the day it was built, and everybody knows,
and the company painted it brown so the leaks would not show,
and the neighbourhood children collect the drips in cups
because molasses is sugar and sugar is not free.
It is unusually warm that day. Forty degrees, in January.

[Chorus]
And it gives. All at once. A wave of molasses
twenty-five feet high, moving at thirty-five miles an hour,
which is not a syrup at that speed, which is a WALL —
it took buildings off their foundations and a train off its rails.
Twenty-one people. Twenty-one, and a hundred and fifty hurt.
Death by sweetness. There is no way to say that lightly.

[Verse 2]
And you cannot swim in it. That is the particular horror.
It is denser than a body. You do not float, you are held,
and the rescuers waded in and were held too, and had to be cut out,
and it took four days to find everyone, and some were unrecognisable
because of what they were coated in, and were identified by objects.
The harbour ran brown until summer. The streets were sticky for years.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And the lawsuit that followed changed how America builds.
Because the company blamed anarchists — they said it was a bomb —
and the court, after three years and three thousand witnesses,
found that it was simply badly made by people who knew,
and for the first time an engineer had to sign for a structure,
and that is why buildings have a signature on them now.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the last of it, moving slowly, and stopping)
They say on hot days you can still smell it.
Probably not. People say it anyway.