Dark Tide (3 page)

ONE

An icy wind roared across Boston’s inner harbor, scraping salt pebbles from the ocean-spray spilling over the seawall and flinging them into Arthur P. Jell’s face. Jell tasted the salty grit between his teeth and felt the sting against his cheeks. Shivering, he cursed the wind as it sliced through his topcoat and into his chest, and flexed his aching fingers inside his thin cloth gloves. December could be Boston’s cruel-est month down at the water, if only because it was so unpredictable. Bostonians
expected
the shocking cold that swept in from the Atlantic every January and February. December, though, was a seasonal tease, red-raw as a fresh wound some years, others as soft and muted as an early-morning drizzle with no indication of the deep winter to come.

This year, to Jell’s annoyance, winter was not being cheated her first month, and the cold settled into his bones and his consciousness early. Every place he turned reminded him of the horrendous December weather: piles of grimy snow that workers had dumped against the freight sheds, puffs of frozen breath encircling the heads of crew members as they exhaled, relentless wind shrieking off the harbor. Winter had squeezed the color and depth from the world in front of him, leaving a series of flat, pale grays—water, sky, clouds, ships, the Bunker Hill monument across the bay in Charlestown, the seagulls that squealed overhead, dipping and gliding on the wind currents—all blending to form a bleak two-dimensional background painting.

In the foreground, the massive shell of the coal-gray tank stood out in stark contrast, the only thing that seemed real to Jell, something majestic being born from something ordinary.

The weather was only a little less foul than Jell’s mood as he watched crews of workmen scurrying up ladders and across shaky scaffolding. They were as anxious as he was to erect the tank.
His
tank. That’s how he felt about the gigantic steel structure that stood before him, so close to completion, but as yet unfinished, a promise unfulfilled. It was an embarrassment
because
it was still incomplete, more than a year after his bosses had put him in charge of the project with the clear and sober instructions that he should give it his highest priority. It was a race against the calendar to get it finished before the molasses steamer from Cuba docked at Boston Harbor in just three days. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, the ship would arrive, its crew ready to pump into the tank seven hundred thousand gallons of the viscous liquid that Jell’s company would later distill into industrial alcohol.

Delays had plagued the project from the start, but Jell still had time to salvage his reputation and his career with his employer, the Purity Distilling Company, and, more importantly, its parent company, U.S. Industrial Alcohol (USIA), if he could meet the December 31 deadline. After months of frustrating negotiations to lease the Commercial Street waterfront location, Jell was scrambling to speed construction along. He had ordered the Hammond Iron Works, the manufacturers and assemblers of the tank, to employ extra crews to finish the job—thirty men now toiled day and night on the tank. He had even approved the installation and expense of additional electric lighting so those crews could work around the clock. “It may be that objections will be raised to our running riveting machines at night, but until we are prevented from doing so, we wish to work both a day and a night shift,” he wrote in a letter to Hammond officials.

Now, Jell watched as workers bent the last of the giant steel plates into place and bolted them together with thousands of rivets. The full height of the tank would be achieved by fastening together seven vertical layers of rounded steel plates, each overlapping the layer below and held in place by a horizontal row of rivets. Vertical rows of rivets sealed the seams of each of the eighteen steel plates that formed the tank’s cylindrical shape. The tank would be the largest in the region by far, standing fifty feet tall, ninety feet in diameter, 240 feet in circumference, with the capacity to hold more than 2 million gallons of molasses.

USIA/Purity Distilling needed the huge tank to store the molasses after it was off-loaded from steamers that transported their shipments from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the West Indies. Crews could then load molasses from the tank onto railcars that would transfer the sugary substance as needed to the company’s manufacturing plant in nearby East Cambridge. There, a small portion of molasses would be distilled into grain alcohol for rum, but most of it, more than 80 percent, would be distilled into industrial alcohol that would be used as a major ingredient in the production of munitions, especially dynamite, smokeless powder, and other high explosives.

USIA and its subsidiaries, including Purity, would sell the alcohol to major weapons manufacturers in the United States, as well as to the British, French, and Canadian governments, to produce munitions for the war against Germany that had broken out in Europe in August 1914. Since then, the demand for industrial alcohol to feed the munitions manufacturing process was greater than Jell had ever seen. Now, despite President Woodrow Wilson’s promises of neutrality, many citizens believed that the United States would become involved. If that happened, the U.S. War Department would become USIA’s largest customer and would order the company to ratchet up production even more.

Even without America’s involvement in the war, the demand for industrial alcohol by friendly European governments was straining current manufacturing capabilities. USIA, one of the nation’s largest industrial alcohol producers, was always in need of a readily available supply of molasses to produce alcohol more quickly and manage inventory more efficiently. Up until now, without a Boston tank of its own to store huge quantities of molasses temporarily, the company was forced to purchase smaller amounts of molasses as needed from a third-party broker with a tank in South Boston. This drove up costs, ate into profit margins, and left USIA at the mercy of another supplier at a time of burgeoning demand for industrial alcohol.

For USIA’s Boston operation to operate at peak efficiency, the Commercial Street molasses tank was the answer. Its enormous storage capacity along with its ideal location, sandwiched between ship traffic in the busy inner harbor and Boston’s major freight rail lines that ran along Commercial Street in Boston’s North End, made it a critical component in USIA’s growth plans.

As treasurer of the Purity Distilling subsidiary, Jell knew those corporate plans all too well, and realized that the company would lose out on profits if the tank was not finished by the time the molasses steamer arrived in Boston. The ship, owned by another subsidiary of USIA, the Cuba Distilling Company, would be delivering about half of her 1.3 million gallons of cargo to USIA distilleries in New York and the remaining molasses to Boston. If the Boston tank were not ready to accept the remaining molasses, the ship would have to find another USIA location to accept the delivery or even dump the product at sea. Either way, this would cost the company time and money.

Already the delay in finishing the tank was costing USIA dearly and causing Jell personal embarrassment. He had hoped the tank would be completed long before this, but negotiations had been difficult with the Boston Elevated Railway Company, whose waterfront land USIA was leasing for the tank site. He had begun discussions with Boston Elevated in January, but they stalled in the spring and early summer, and were not concluded until late September. It then took one month for the Hugh Nawn Construction Company to build the concrete foundation upon which the massive steel tank would sit. Fabricated steel plates for the tank didn’t arrive in Boston until the first week in December.

Even with a perfect December, Jell had recognized that the construction schedule would be tight—and December had been far from perfect.

First, death had visited the tank construction site. On the morning of December 8, Thomas DeFratus of Charlestown, a thirty-five-year-old laborer, toppled from a staging plank and plunged forty feet inside the tank to his death. Jell still remembered the doomed man’s scream and the anxious shouts of the other men. He felt sorry for DeFratus and his friends, many of whom were crying as they pulled their comrade’s broken body from inside the tank shell and awaited the medical examiner. But Jell was most distraught because the incident cost him a precious half-day of work by the time the body was finally removed to the North District Mortuary. Worse, for several days afterward, he watched the careful movements of the other men, their white-knuckled grips on the rungs as they climbed ladders, the methodical step-by-step high-wire walk across scaffolding, their boots sliding tentatively along planks searching for a toehold, their fingers brushing the side of the tank for balance. They were frightened men working in slow motion. Jell recognized that their fear had to run its course, and he was relieved three days later when the work pace had finally returned to normal.

His relief, though, was short-lived. On December 13 and 14, a vicious storm with gale-force winds pounded Boston. The newspapers called it a “superstorm,” the worst in a dozen years. Two massive fronts collided in upstate New York and dumped more than twenty inches of snow west of Boston as well as a torrential rain and a driving sleet within the city. Trains were delayed and streets were rendered impassable due to the flooding. Heavy wind knocked down electric power lines, chimneys, trees, and signs that hung outside of storefronts. The popular roller coaster at Nantasket Beach, south of Boston, was toppled by the wind, falling across the street, snapping wires and crashing against utility poles.

The superstorm with the fifty-mile-an-hour gale meant a two-day construction delay at the Commercial Street molasses tank. And even on the third day, crews spent most of the morning clearing debris from the site and pumping water that had collected in the well of the tank. Jell took some solace that the wind had not damaged the tank’s shell, which then stood about thirty feet high.

Workers made good progress between December 15 and Christmas Day—another lost workday for Jell—and then, as if to taunt him, a December 26 sleet storm forced him to stop work for another day. In a bizarre case of déjà vu, winds in this storm were so severe that they destroyed the Boston area’s other landmark roller coaster, this one on Revere Beach, north of the city.