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From Argosy Magazine, November 1974
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FIRE! FIRE! ANATOMY OF TERROR
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By Hal Bruno
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It was 2:41 p.m., December 1, 1958, a damp, gloomy afternoon in Chicago. The loud switchboard buzzer signaled an incoming emergency call; the fire alarm operator's voice was calm but business-like as he said: “Fire Department.” A heavily-accented woman's voice on the other end was hysterical and almost unintelligible as she screamed the familiar words, “Fire! Fire!” Experience had taught him how to pry out the address—3808 West Iowa Street. Another operator at the alarm board flipped switches and repeated the address into a microphone that sent his voice booming from loudspeakers in firehouses six miles away on the far West Side. Bells rang in the quarters of Engine 85, Hook-and-Ladder 35, Rescue Squad 6 and the 18th Battalion Chief. Firemen stepped into their boots, pulled on coats and helmets while doors swung open and sirens howled, and the “still alarm” companies rolled into the wet, wintry streets.
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Two minutes passed before the men downtown in the City Hall fire alarm office got their first clue that this was not just another routine alarm. At 2:43, two more phone calls came in for the same address, and the Chief Operator followed standard procedure by immediately giving the order to “strike a box.” Ten seconds later, another call informed them that a school was on fire at 909 Avers Avenue, just around the corner from the original address. Then the switchboard lit up with three simultaneous calls, including one from an excited man shouting that children were trapped in the school. By then, the chief operator already was tapping the telegraph key that transmitted box alarms to every firehouse in the city. In nearly a hundred stations, blue-shirted firemen stopped whatever they were doing to count the tolling of the bell as 5-1-8-2 rang in four times on the “joker,” punching the number on a tape, turning on overhead lights and setting off “waker” bells for the companies that were due to respond to Box 5182. Three more engines, another hook-and-ladder truck and battalion chief, plus a division marshal and fire insurance patrol unit were on the way when Engine 85 arrived on the scene.
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It was 2:44, only three short minutes since the first phone call. Engine 85 had gone to the Iowa Street address — the rectory for Our Lady of the Angels church - where they spotted smoke billowing up around the corner. As 85's pumper turned into Avers Avenue, firemen on the back step gasped in horror and the officer in the front seat reached for his radio to request the box alarm that already was being sounded. Heavy black smoke was belching from every second-floor window in the north wing of a two-story, U-shaped brick school building; orange flames were licking out from a side entrance at the rear. A thousand frightened children were streaming from the ground floor exits and down a fire escape from the south wing that was not yet touched by the fire. But on the north side of the burning structure, small bodies came hurtling from the high second-floor windows, landing on the pavement with a bone-breaking crunch. A half-dozen frantic civilians ran back and forth attempting to catch the jumping children or break the fall with their own bodies.
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Half of Engine 85's crew led out with a 2 1/2 inch hose line to the back entrance that appeared to be the seat of the fire; the others raised a 35-foot extension ladder to a window where they could see terrified children about to jump. Hook-and-ladder 35 pulled up and instantly went into action with their seldom-used life net. Rescue Squad 6 arrived and took over the net, freeing 35's truckmen to throw up ladders as fast as they could pull them from the truck. In the distance they could hear the wail of approaching sirens as the box alarm companies responded. The 18th Battalion Chief came in, took one look and radioed for a second alarm--sending four more engines, two additional hook-and-ladders, another rescue squad, a high pressure wagon and water tower to Box 5182. “Give us every available ambulance!” he added. Six minutes had now elapsed since the fire department first learned of the fire,
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The second engine to arrive stretched two lines into the front entrance, and firemen crawled upstairs on their hands and knees, attempting to reach the smoke-filled second floor behind the spray from their fog nozzles. Other companies joined in raising ladders on the north side of the building, where the men scrambled up to pull children from the windows and carry them down. In desperation, some were dropped into life nets by firemen who plunged into the boiling classrooms to grab for anyone they could reach. A ladder company with axes and pike poles was trying to open a front section of the roof so that crews fighting their way up the stairs could breathe. Suddenly, without warning, there was a woosh of super-heated gas, and flames shot into the air above the building. Firemen who had clawed their way from the front entrance to the second floor were knocked down the stairs by a hot blast as the roof caved in. The upper floor was engulfed in fire.
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In scores of fire stations across Chicago's sprawling West Side, firemen stood by their trucks, listening to the fire radio and tensely waiting for the third alarm or the “strike out” signal. They had heard the ominous special call for ambulances and some put on their boots while others nervously checked their equipment. The tension built for ten minutes, then the radio crackled and the fire alarm operator said: “Go ahead Battalion Eighteen . . . Okay, we'll give you a five-eleven!” When the roof fell in, the chief had jumped it from a second to a fifth alarm—14 more engines, another hook-and-ladder, rescue squad, high pressure wagon and water tower, plus support equipment. Most of these companies were going out the door as the 5-11 alarm began ringing on the “joker,” It was 2:57 p.m., 14 minutes since the fire was first reported.
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Now a huge cloud of thick black smoke had blossomed into the sky and could be seen for miles, like a homing beacon for the army of fire apparatus converging on Our Lady of the Angels school. As they rolled toward the fire, ambulances and police squadrols raced away from the scene, carrying injured children to nearby hospitals. If any were left in that second floor it was too late to save them and incoming companies concentrated on fighting the fire, pulling their hose lines through crowds of panic-stricken parents who dashed about the streets searching for their children. Those who found them wept with relief; those who didn't became too numb to cry. “I'll never forget the look on those parents' faces,” recalls a fireman who arrived on the fifth alarm.
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It was not a particularly difficult fire to fight and the extra-alarm companies swiftly confined it to the second floor of the north wing. The department's experimental new “snorkel” unit swung from window to window on the north side, knocking down fire with a heavy stream while crews inside the building cut it off at the U where the two wings joined and battled their way up the stairs. They took more of a beating than they had to because of their anxiety to reach those six classrooms on the second floor. When they did, they found the bodies of third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade children piled up against the windows, buried under the debris of the collapsed roof and, in one room, still sitting at their desks. Most had died from the smoke and searing gasses in the first few seconds after the fire flashed down the second-floor corridor. The death toll was 90 children and three nuns.
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Even before the fire was officially declared under control at 4:19 p.m., investigators had located its point of origin and knew that the 93 deaths might have been prevented. The fire-possibly accidental, possibly set by a pupil-had been smoldering for some time in or near rubbish barrels waiting to be collected from the basement stairwell at the northeast corner of the building. It was discovered around 2:25 by a janitor, who ran to the rectory and told the housekeeper to phone the fire department while he went back to sound the building alarm. Meanwhile, a teacher had smelled smoke and pulled an alarm box inside to start the school fire drill, about 2:35. And here was the first tragic error of omission: there was no city fire box in front of the school and the internal alarm system was not connected to the fire department. It was the familiar and fatal combination of delayed discovery and a delayed alarm.
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Investigators agreed that regardless of what or who started the fire, both delays could have been avoided if the school had been protected by an automatic sprinkler system (at an estimated cost of $9,000 in 1958). Sprinklers would have extinguished the smoldering fire at the bottom of the stairs or at least confined it while automatically setting off the school fire alarm and signaling a watch service that would have notified the fire department. All of this would have happened a full 15 or 20 minutes before that first hysterical phone call. No one would have died.
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Even without sprinklers, precious minutes and lives might have been saved if a city fire box had been connected to the school's internal alarm system. Without these protective devices, the fire had time to get going, roar up the open rear stairwell and into the cockloft (airspace between the ceiling and roof), then flash down the heavily varnished wood corridor on the second floor, trapping the children in their classrooms. An ordinary wood door was charred on one side, but it prevented the fire from entering the first floor corridor; unfortunately, there was nothing to stop it at the top of the stairs. The open stairwell was a second fatal factor and it acted like a chimney. The full tragedy of Our Lady of the Angels school was expressed by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), whose report on the fire declared: “. . . There are really no new lessons to be learned from this fire. It is the old story of open stairways, poor housekeeping practices, delayed discovery, delayed alarm and lack of automatic fire protection in the building.” A coroner's jury recommended that all schools be wired to the city fire alarm box, all open stairwells be enclosed and automatic sprinklers be installed.
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It was a disaster waiting to happen, for there had been ample warnings in previous school fires over a period of 50 years. The morning of March 4, 1908, smoke was seen coming from a closet under the basement stairs of the Lake View school, in the Cleveland suburb of Collinwood. Ohio. Like Our Lady of the Angels-built in 1903 and remodeled in 1951-the Collinwood school was of brick construction with wood interior finish and furnishings. The fire spread up the stairs with such speed and sudden intensity that heat and smoke caused children marching out in a fire drill to panic; 175 were killed. In calling for the use of fireproof interiors and metal furnishings in schools, the Cleveland Inspection Bureau's 1908 report puzzled over what to do about existing buildings and concluded: “. . . about the only safeguard would appear to be to install a modified system of automatic sprinklers.”
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What happened in the 50 years between the Collinwood and Chicago disasters? The answer: not much, except for other fatal school fires on a smaller scale. More importantly, what has happened in the 16 years since Our Lady of the Angels' fire? Many safe new schools have been built, but all across the country there still are schools without fire alarms connected to their local fire department, some still have open stairwells and comparatively few are protected by automatic sprinklers-which many school administrators argue against as “too expensive.”
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Schools are not the only place where lessons have gone unheeded. On November 28, 1942, fire swept the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston, killing 492 people in one fast stroke. The tremendous death toll was attributed to over-crowding, insufficient and locked exits, inflammable decorations, a sudden burst of intense heat and smoke followed by panic. Two hundred of the victims were found trapped behind a revolving door that had jammed with bodies. The NFPA report on the Coconut Grove pointed out that it was “only a repetition of what has happened in previous fire disasters,” and warned that the only way to prevent panic is to eliminate the conditions that cause it. These were cited as not enough exits, bottlenecks on stairs and passageways leading to exits, and escape routes not clearly marked and visible from every point in a room.
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Experience has shown that people do crazy things when they hear the cry “Fire! Fire!” Some go into a blind panic and just run—sometimes into a dead end trap; others delay in leaving or go back to get a canary cage or their wallet on the dresser. They dash into smoke-filled corridors that mean certain death when they could have stayed in a safe room; they jump from a window while firemen are raising ladders to save them. The point is that fire safety cannot be left to human nature; it must be engineered into a building when it's built or added under the pressure of tough new fire laws. The average person simply cannot cope with the terror of a fire.
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Unlike other disasters, there is nothing “natural” about a fire in a crowded building. Most could be prevented; comparatively few are set by arsonists. The usual cause is human carelessness.
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A carelessly discarded cigarette or match is believed to have started a small fire on the ninth floor of the 10-story Triangle Shirt Waist building on New York's lower East Side. It was quitting time in the sweat shop, the late afternoon of March 25, 1911. Hundreds of immigrant workers—mostly young women—were trapped as flames flashed across the ninth floor, cutting off the stairs and two elevators. A shower of falling bodies greeted the first horse-drawn steamers and ladder trucks that galloped up the street. Dozens of women were clinging to ninth- and tenth-floor window ledges, well beyond the reach of the 75- and 85-foot wooden aerial ladders then in use. Firemen swarmed up the face of the building on dangerous scaling ladders and desperately tried to catch the women in their life nets. But the impact of the falling body from that height smashed the nets to the pavement and many were killed by others plummeting down on top of them. Five girls jumped hand-in-hand from the ninth floor; horrified spectators watched as a boy and girl kissed, then stepped from a window ledge in each other's arms. Inside the building, other victims were jumping nine floors down the elevator shaft. The fire itself was brought under control in ten minutes; by then, 145 workers were dead.
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Firemen in Atlanta, Georgia, were confronted by a similar sight when they rolled up Peachtree Street to the 15-story Interco Hotel in the early morning hours of December 7, 1946. Fire was glowing in windows from the third floor upward and terrified guests were hanging from improvised ropes made of bed sheets knotted together. Bodies crashed into the hotel marquee and bounced into the street or dangled lifelessly over the edge. Some who jumped from the lower floors were saved in the nets; those who leaped from the upper floors were doomed, once again proving that the life net is a last-ditch, desperation tool with only limited effectiveness. Most of the 119 victims who died were far beyond the reach of the tallest modern aerial ladder. The Interco investigation revealed the usual delayed discovery and delayed alarm, open stairwells that spread the fire with astonishing speed, inflammable materials and wood walls in a supposedly “fireproof” building, no outside fire escapes, no fire alarm system and no automatic sprinklers. Any of these devices-especially enclosed stairwells and/or sprinklers-would have prevented the loss of life.
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Atlanta and other cities had been warned only six months earlier, when 61 people died in Chicago's La Sale Hotel, shortly after midnight, June 5, 1946. The fire started in a ground floor cocktail lounge of the 23-story “fireproof” hotel. It quickly turned the two-story lobby into a blazing inferno and spread up two open stairwells. As usual, the killing force was superheated smoke and gas that struck down victims as they rushed from their rooms into corridors that had become death traps. Almost as a preview for Atlanta, useless bed sheets could be seen hanging from the upper floor windows when the fire was brought under control. There had been a delayed alarm when employees tried to put out a small fire with an extinguisher before calling the fire department. The lobby's high ceiling and open staircases were likened to a fireplace with two chimneys and the richly paneled wood walls were compared to putting a two-story frame house inside a solid brick building, then calling it “fireproof.” In a familiar refrain, the fire investigators recommended laws calling for enclosed stairwells, metal fire doors in the corridors, fire-resistant interior finishing, automatic fire alarms and sprinkler systems for all hotels. Six months later, Atlanta and most other cities had not made these regulations retroactive to cover existing hotels because the operators and owners complained about the cost.
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In fire-fighting terms, a “high rise” building is any whose upper floors are beyond the reach of a department's longest ladder. This usually means anything over eight or ten stories in height, and once again the warnings of fire prevention experts are being ignored in many American cities. For the past 20 years, skyscraper office and apartment buildings have been built with little regard for protecting lives in a fire. Plastic materials that give off toxic gas when burned are used for the interior finish and decorations; so-called “fireproof” buildings continue to be furnished with highly inflammable materials. Air conditioning ducts spread smoke to every floor and sealed windows cannot be open or broken. Automatic elevators have heat-sensitive controls, causing them to go to the floor involved in fire where the doors stick open while the occupants roast to death. Floor plans call for vast open spaces or flimsy walls that can cheaply partition an area into cubbyhole offices, thereby enabling a fire to sweep across an entire floor in minutes. There are no exterior fire escapes and not enough fire-safe inside stairwells to permit large numbers of people to escape from the upper floors. Finally, fire engineers have discovered the “stack effect,” a phenomenon that forces heat and smoke up or down inside a building, depending on the outside temperature. Many modern, gleaming skyscrapers are, in effect, carefully constructed death traps for millions who live and work in them every day.
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“This country hasn't had its definitive high-rise fire, yet,” an American fire chief warns, but all of the ingredients are there. Even without a disaster to match the most recent Sao Paulo fire, the death toll in American skyscrapers is a frightening warning of what can happen unless immediate steps are taken to modify city codes and make them retroactive to cover already existing buildings. On November 29, 1972, ten elderly people were killed in a fire on the seventh floor of the Baptist Towers apartment house in Atlanta. Later the same day, in New Orleans, four people died in a fire in the upper floors of the 16-story Adult Center office building. In this fire, helicopters were successfully used to rescue people trapped on the roof. But a helicopter is a tool of desperation and cannot be counted on in all conditions, especially when there are nearby obstructions or a burning skyscraper creates its own firestorm. Chicago, New York, Columbus, Ohio, are among the cities that have had fatal high-rise building fires in the past five years. In some office buildings, only pure luck saved lives when the fires occurred after working hours.
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Along with the high-rise menace, a growing American fire problem is the rash of killer fires in nursing homes, which are increasing in number as our population grows older. But as modern medicine saves lives, fire kills the elderly in the buildings where they have been sent to spend their final years. The death toll is attributed to the old familiar causes: overcrowding, insufficient exits, open stairwells, inflammable interiors and the lack of automatic fire alarms and sprinklers.
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Some enlightened corporations, designers and builders have taken the initiative and started to build fire safety into their buildings. The 110-story Sears Tower in Chicago has $5 million worth of safety equipment, including elevators that go to the ground floor in a fire, many fire-safe enclosed stairwells, an automatic fire alarm and sprinkler system. Unfortunately, the Sears Tower and others like it are still the exception rather than the rule. Every fire safety law on the books can be traced to a series of disasters in which hundreds of people died.
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Despite the outcry that follows every fire disaster, powerful lobbies that represent those who build, own or operate the buildings often have more “clout” than the safety experts when it comes to the nutty-gritty business of passing new laws and having them strictly enforced. The news of a fire is always Page One; a year later, the story of a proposed safety ordinance being defeated or watered down is buried inside the newspaper. The building codes and safety devices recommended by the experts remove the human factor by stopping fire from spreading, turning in the alarm and preventing panic from ever getting started. Years of experience have proven the automatic sprinkler to be the most effective life-saving device, but ordinances calling for sprinklers and other safety measures frequently are blocked by special interest groups who object to the additional cost.
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As long as saving money continues to be more important than saving lives, the cry of “Fire! Fire!” will continue to be the most terrifying and deadly sound modern man can hear.
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Story © 1974 Popular Publications, Inc.
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