My Opinion of Dark Tide

Before reading Dark Tide, I expected the book to be only about the molasses spill and the events that followed. When I first started reading the book, I realized that I needed all the background information for me to connect to certain parts of the book. At the beginning, when Puleo was describing the speedy building of the tank and the lack of safety inspection, I immediately assumed that the tank burst due to how fast it was put up and the lack of care to do it. Then, when I was reading the section about the Italian anarchists, I then found myself second guessing, thinking that maybe the anarchists were planning on blowing it up like they did with everything else. When the tank finally came down, I like how Puleo used about 10 different points of view to describe the tank's demolition. It helped the reader get a feel on how some people reacted or were affected than others.

After the disaster, I expected a lot of people to die in the disaster, but only 21 people died. I thought I was going to see numbers in the hundreds, but that was not the case, becuase when the tank fell apart, everyone in the immediate area had gone to lunch, so there weren't a lot of people around. The effects it had on Boston and the rest of the country did not surprise me becuase that was really the first national disaster to happen.

The four year court was amazing. I can't believe it took them four years to come to the conclusion that USIA was at fault for the tank disaster. The amount of witnesses and the amount of information that was collected was surreal. It took Ogden another 10 months after the case ended to state his final say of the case. Also, the amount of money USIA had to pay (which was about 650,000 dollars) was such an immense amount of money. In today's standards, that number would be in the millions. This book was a decent and accurate representation of the molasses disaster of 1919.