One claim is that the coming Volstead Act "inspired" sabotage
(yeah, yeah, "no sabotage found"), allowing the company to
collect on the insurance.
Another claim is that on hot sultry days, you can still smell the
molasses. Between nor'easters, storms, and hurricanes, I do
find that hard to believe.
As for Halifax, they send a tree to Boston every Christmas as a
"thank you" for the aid train sent immediately after the French
ship blew up in the harbor. A Montreal aid train derailed.
There's a "recent" dramatized movie on it. "Agent Scully" plays
a woman pulled from the rubble. (Yes, I read the credits)
The British officer whose waiving of the commonsense rules that
contributed to the disaster was reassigned to Boston. The
French captain that abandoned his burning ship that "drifted"
deeper into the harbor before it exploded, got medals for
services (after Halifax) during the rest of WWI.
The Galveston disaster happened in the early days of understanding
the power of hurricanes. Not that it stops people from living
in hurricane-prone areas today. There's documentary on what
Galveston did to raise the level of the island and add seawalls
after the hurricane. The environazis would be dropping dead
of apoplexia if it were done today. By all rights, Galveston
should have been renamed Fishkill.
General Robert was active in Methodist Church matters and, being an army officer, would become impatient with what he thought were inefficient and poorly run church meetings. His little pamphlet on how to conduct a meeting evolved into the Rules of Order we're so familiar with today.
My mother was a little girl of 5 years living in Halifax during the explosion. She recalled sitting on the bed in the upstairs bedroom beneath the blown-out skylight waiting for the German soldiers to climb down from the roof.
All of the buildings in the area affected by the molasses flood are old, porous brick. As a student, there were a couple of hot days when I noticed the smell before I ever learned about the molasses flood or saw the plaque. It could have been the smell from from the local businesses, but the smell was different than in other parts of the North End.
I'm not saying it was molasses . . . but there was a slight, inoffensive, sweet odor. And with all of that old brick and cracked mortar, I don't believe you could ever clean the area of molasses short of tearing it down and rebuilding it.