"There were often comments made by people around the vicinity that this tank would shudder and groan every time it was full, and it leaked from day one," Puleo said. There were signs that the tank was faltering, but the people of the North End had gotten used to its instability. So there were deliveries all day long, this was a bustling, hustling kind of place." "Almost all of the shipping that left Boston to go up and down the East Coast, to go to Europe, left from this site. "This was one of the busiest commercial sites in all of Boston," Puleo said. Perched right on Boston Harbor, the tank was perfectly situated in a hub of trade activity. A plaque commemorates the Boston Molasses Flood. By the time of the flood, the war was over, and the molasses inside was expected to become rum in the last days before Prohibition. The tank was built to be a holding vessel for molasses until it could be transported to a nearby distillery, where it was converted into industrial alcohol for World War I munitions. There was a pipe right here that led to the molasses tank, and they would offload gallons of molasses into the tank." "Ships that would come up from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the West Indies would pull up right along here.
"So, that green sign right there is exactly the site of the outside wall of the tank," he said. On a brisk winter day, Stephen Puleo, author of " Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919," gestured toward the spot where a tank in Boston's North End burst, releasing a tsunami of hot molasses into the streets 100 years ago, on Jan. (AP) This article is more than 3 years old. The disaster took 21 lives and injured 40. The ruins of a tank containing 2 1/2 million gallons of molasses lie in a heap after an eruption that hurled trucks against buildings and crumpled houses in the North End of Boston, on Jan.