Wikipedia

Cleanup crews used salt water from a fireboat to wash away the molasses and sand to absorb it,[17] and the harbor was brown with molasses until summer.[18] The cleanup in the immediate area took weeks,[19] with several hundred people contributing to the effort,[7]: 132–134, 139 [15] and it took longer to clean the rest of Greater Boston and its suburbs. Rescue workers, cleanup crews, and sight-seers had tracked molasses through the streets and spread it to subway platforms, to the seats inside trains and streetcars, to pay telephone handsets, into homes,[6][7]: 139  and to countless other places. It was reported that "Everything that a Bostonian touched was sticky."[6]