To hide the leaks in the tank they painted it brown to match the molasses.
And blamed the failure on ‘anarchists’ despite the tank not even meeting the incredibly low safety standards of 1919
Anarchists getting strays from both capitalists AND tankies is so fuckin annoying bro 😭
But it’s how you know you’re doing something right!
Damn, that’s striking!
You should post that to !historyphotos@piefed.social !
Oh heck yeah!
Another good case of corporations killing people AND getting away with it! Hurray!
but a court-appointed auditor found USIA responsible after three years of hearings, and the company ultimately paid out $628,000 in damages ($11.4 million in 2024, adjusted for inflation). Relatives of those killed reportedly received around $7,000 per victim (equivalent to $127,000 in 2024).
What not get away in you book?
No criminal charges? Yeah, getting away in my book.
Corporate personhood, for better and worse, makes it harder to charge individual employees with a crime unless you have really specific evidence for their particular involvement.
On one hand, this is good, because it’s much easier to prove “This business clearly fucked up” than “This individual was definitely involved in this fuckup” that trials of individuals go through. Separately, but non-negligibly, it also provides for a much greater insulation of economic and social competition; some guy pursuing a legal vendetta will not sink a company when the founder goes to jail for an unrelated matter, and nor will an investor whose only involvement was liking the funny acronym and buying stocks be charged with murder for the negligence of some fuckwit boss.
On the other hand, it’s bad because it encourages bad actors to use corporate personhood as a shield. As corporations have no sense of self-preservation, running a corporation into the ground - either by dismantling it or intentionally running dangerous shit like this - has very few downsides to its investors/controllers, so long as they do so intentionally and with a mind to profit from it.
I was a chemical process safety specialist once, not in the US. The Hazards Analysis team has, in that jurisdiction, criminal responsibility of identifying reasonable risks according to industry best practice. Someone with executive power is appointed within the company to bear criminal responsibility for executing the HA recommendations in a timely manner, usually a site manager.
So let’s say a toxic release happens and people have to be hospitalized and there’s death to river fauna and flora. The company bears financial and civil responsibility for it. But the people in the HA team and the company executive bear criminal responsibility.
I actually worked under a site manager that had to answer a criminal case for a pollution incident. The the people were acquitted (and rightfully so, there was no negligence nor malice), and the company had to pay environmental recovery and a fine.
You can bet that manager was on top of all safety and environmental studies on that site.
Intentionally shirking on safety is nothing short of killing people with malice aforethought. Every industrial accident caused by it should have every in the direct chain of command indicted for first degree murder. Anything less is indeed getting away with it, murder that is. But murder is barely a misdemeanor if you do it to make money for a corporation.
That seems a little light tbh. There was so much neglect and purposeful head-on-sand burying to cause this accident compared to what they paid out. I am a pretty staunch advocate for throwing the book at corporations, tho, so I’d settle for having the company dismantled and the assets sold to pay out all the families instead.
That’s pretty light for what was effectively killing people to save a few bucks. It’s not literally nothing, but I would’ve liked to have seen something much steeper than that.
the resultant wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour (56 kilometers per hour)
JFC, that is so much more horrifying than I was imagining. I have TROUBLE imagining a wave of molasses moving that fast.
Oh man what a great rabbithole
Definetly. I also found this list of non water floods for further rabbithole diving. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-water_floods
Will a glass of rum suffice? They were definitely not storing massive amounts of molasses as a baking ingredient.
They wanted to store that before Prohibition came along so that was probably the reason.
No offense but if you can’t outrun molasses in January maybe you deserve to swim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
the resultant wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour (56 kilometers per hour)
Think you can outrun a bear? Because the molasses was faster than a bear
I always travel with a hiking partner I can outrun in bear country.
Well, that’s your first mistake, son. This here’s molasses country!
It’s the same basic principle though right?
Molasses hungers
Lotta weight behind that molasses, some 35 mph worth.
Turns out, I AM slower than molasses in January…
