Context: I grew up around Boston and was always fascinated with this bizarre incident. Someone challenged me to write a poem about it (with lots of rhymes for "molasses").
I wanted to describe a scene of what led up to the disaster, of the tank being filled with heated molasses the day before. But Wikipedia and google images have failed to tell/show me what the kind of ship that carried molasses in 1919 looked like (like an oil tanker?) And how the liquid got from the ship to the storage tank (hoses? Drums, rails?)
If anyone can answer this question about shipping/dock work in the 1910s, it'd be much appreciated, and I can share my poem with you when it's finished!
Stephen Puleo's book Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 (2003) offers some information that you may find useful.
The molasses that leaked so catastrophically in Boston arrived in the city on board the tanker SS Miliero on the morning of 12 January 1919, three days before the disaster. The ship carried a total cargo of 1.3 million gallons of the stuff, and pumped 600,000 gallons of this into the tank belonging to the Purity Distilling Company in Commercial Street, located only a few yards away from the Charles River, that would explode on the 15th. According to Pulao, the transfer was occasioned through a special pipe that connected the PDC to the docks, using hydraulic "discharge pumps" on board the ship. This pipe was, I think, regularly used to transfer cargoes to the PDC and had not been constructed specially for this one job. The process took from 11.20am on the 12th until 10.40am on the 13th to complete.
According to Frank van Gelder, the Miliero's skipper, the procedure was routine: "We had no trouble with this delivery... it was a normal discharge."
Not especially poetic. But I hope it helps.