A RIVER RUNS PUTRID: A SUMMER OF FILTH, 1858

The city of London breathed in the heat of summer, 1858. But it was not merely the sun that baked the metropolis. An even more unpleasant force infested its very heart: the River Thames. Years of industrial discharges had transformed London's lifeblood into a stench. The stench was all-consuming, a miasma that clung to every cobblestone and infused

On a blustery afternoon in that fateful year, disaster unfolded Boston. A massive holding filled with sticky, sweet molasses gave way sending a wall of of the thick liquid rushing through the streets. The power was catastrophic, crushing buildings and trapping people in a treacly mass. Scores of people were lost their lives, and many more sustain