With this in mind, the company alleged that the tank had been intentionally blown up by “evilly disposed persons.” In 1918, when World War I was still underway, an unidentified man had even called USIA’s office and threatened to destroy the tank with dynamite. The flood had occurred during a period of increased terrorist activity from Italian anarchist groups, which had previously been blamed for dozens of bombings across the country. The plaintiffs argued that the molasses tank had been too thin and shoddily built to safely hold its contents, but USIA offered a very different explanation for the rupture: sabotage. In the wake of the disaster, the victims filed 119 different lawsuits against United States Industrial Alcohol. Workers freed the survivors after several hours of cutting away floorboards and debris, but not before one of the firefighters lost his strength and drowned. The most dramatic rescue took place at the Engine 31 firehouse, where several of the men from the lunchtime card game were trapped in a molasses-flooded pocket of space on the collapsed first floor. The first responders struggled to wade through the quicksand-like molasses, which had begun to harden in the winter chill, but they soon began plucking survivors from the wreckage. Police and firefighters arrived at the disaster scene within minutes, as did over a hundred sailors from the Navy ship USS Nantucket. “Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was.” “Here and there struggled a form-whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell,” a Boston Post reporter wrote. Almost as quickly as it had crashed, the molasses wave receded, revealing a half-mile swath of crushed buildings, crumpled bodies and waist-deep muck.