It spurred the city to form a social club task force with 200 inspectors. The numbers dwindled over the years, and now the city deploys MARCH (Multi Agency Response to Community Hotspots) to inspect and close hazardous locations.

Frank Lindsay, FDNY’s chief inspector for public safety since 1990 – the year of the Happy Land inferno – says the growing problem in social club safety is attributable to “flipping” – where a space is often a restaurant by day but transformed into a dancehall by night.

“If it’s a restaurant, they just move tables and turn it into an illegal cabaret and charge at the door,” Lindsay said. “They’re all over the place,” he added, noting the highest levels of “flipping” are in Manhattan.

“These places get overcrowded and there’s no sprinkler system or fire alarm like there would be in a regulated club,” he said. “The exit facilities are substandard and, without a doubt, a Happy Land situation could occur in these places.”

Complaints for noise and loitering come mainly from residents living near the trouble spots. The MARCH team is made up of representatives from the NYPD, FDNY, the State Liquor Authority and the city’s Buildings and Health departments. Inspectors shows up at establishments during peak hours on weekends to investigate. If violations are found, the FDNY can issue orders to vacate, hand out summonses on the spot and, in extreme cases, padlock the doors.

Ivine Galarza, district manager of Community Board 6, where Happy Land operated, dubbed March “Fire Prevention and Safety Month” in her community to remind those of the lives lost in that blaze.

“If they can get away with it, believe me, they will,” she said of club operators. “Most of them [in the Bronx] are up to code because we are vigilant.”

“People who own clubs want to make as much money as they can and they will put people in danger,” said NYPD Deputy Inspector William McSorley, who has been inspecting clubs for the past 10 years and says he comes across many repeat offenders.

McSorley, commanding officer of the 48th Precinct, cites overcrowding as a major problem in Bronx clubs.

“The reasons why we have so many rules and regulations is because of tragedies,” he said. “They don’t see the potential problems by having too many people in a club or not having a fire door or security – they look at it as losing money by not letting everyone in.”

Galarza said the inspections are “an ongoing process” that will continue. “Everyone wants to be safe and make certain where they go won’t turn into another Happy Land situation.”

A memorial Mass will be celebrated today at 7 p.m. at St. Thomas Aquinas Church, 1900 Crotona Parkway, followed by a vigil at the Happy Land Memorial Monument across the street from where the tragedy occurred.

from the NY Daily News – March 25th, 2011

NEW YORK, NY – On the warm spring afternoon of March 25, 1911, a small fire broke out in a bin of rags at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory on New York City’s Lower East Side. In less than an hour, 146 people—most of them young immigrant women—died, trapped by blocked exit doors and faulty fire escapes. One of the worst industrial fires in U.S. history, the Triangle fire galvanized working people and middle-class reformers alike, ultimately resulting in the passage of several laws designed to insure workplace safety. The fire received sensational and extensive coverage in all the New York City newspapers. William Gunn Shepherd, a young reporter for the New York World, happened to be at the scene of the fire when it began. From a phone across the street, he gave a minute-by-minute account of the unfolding events to his city editor. The World published them the following day.

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At 4:35 o’clock yesterday afternoon, fire, springing from a source that may never be positively identified, was discovered in the rear of the eighth floor of the ten-story building at the northwest corner of Washington Place and Greene Street, the first of three floors occupied as a factory by the Triangle Waist Company. At two o’clock this morning Chief Croker estimated the total dead as 154. More than a third of those who lost their lives did so in jumping from windows. The firemen who answered the first of the four alarms turned in found thirty bodies on the pavements of Washington Place and Greene Street.

It was the most appalling horror since the Slocum disaster and the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago. Every available ambulance in Manhattan was called upon to cart the dead to the morgue bodies charred to unrecognizable blackness or reddened to a sickly hue—as was to be seen by shoulders or limbs protruding through flame-eaten clothing. Men and women, boys and girls were of the dead that littered the street; that is actually the condition—the streets were littered.

The fire began in the eighth story. The flames licked and shot their way up through the other two stories. All three floors were occupied by the Triangle Waist Company. The estimate of the number of employees at work is made by Chief Croker at about 1,000. The proprietors of the company say 700 men and girls were in their place. Before smoke or flame gave signs from the windows, the loss of life was fully under way. The first signs that persons in the street knew that these three top stories had turned into red furnaces in which human creatures were being caught and incinerated was when screaming men and women and boys and girls crowded out on the many window ledges and threw themselves into the streets far below. They jumped with their clothing ablaze. The hair of some of the girls streamed up aflame as they leaped. Thud after thud sounded on the pavements. It is a ghastly fact that on both the Greene Street and Washington Place sides of the building there grew mounds of the dead and dying. And the worst horror of all was that in this heap of the dead now and then there stirred a limb or sounded a moan.

Within the three flaming floors it was as frightful. There flames enveloped many so that they died instantly. When Fire Chief Croker could make his way into these three floors, he found sights that utterly staggered him, that sent him, a man used to viewing horrors, back and down into the street with quivering lips. The floors were black with smoke. And then he saw as the smoke drifted away bodies burned to bare bones. There were skeletons bending over sewing machines.

The elevator boys saved hundreds. They each made twenty trips from the time of the alarm until twenty minutes later when they could do no more. Fire was streaming into the shaft, flames biting at the cables. They fled for their own lives. Some, about seventy, chose a successful avenue of escape. They clambered up a ladder to the roof. A few remembered the fire escape. Many may have thought of it but only as they uttered cries of dismay.

Wretchedly inadequate was this fire escape—a lone ladder running down to a rear narrow court, which was smoke filled as the fire raged, one narrow door giving access to the ladder. By the score they fought and struggled and breathed fire and died trying to make that needle-eye road to self-preservation.

Shivering at the chasm below them, scorched by the fire behind, there were some that still held positions on the window sills when the first squad of firemen arrived. The nets were spread below with all promptness. Citizens were commandeered into service, as the firemen necessarily gave their attention to the one engine and hose of the force that first arrived. The catapult force that the bodies gathered in the long plunges made the nets utterly without avail. Screaming girls and men, as they fell, tore the nets from the grasp of the holders, and the bodies struck the sidewalks and lay just as they fell. Some of the bodies ripped big holes through the life nets.

Concentrated, the fire burned within. The flames caught all the flimsy lace stuff and linens that go into the making of spring and summer shirtwaists and fed eagerly upon the rolls of silk. The cutting room was laden with the stuff on long tables. The employees were toiling over such material at the rows and rows of machines. Sinisterly the spring day gave aid to the fire. Many of the window panes facing south and east were drawn down. Draughts had full play. The experts say that the three floors must each have become a whirlpool of fire. Whichever way the entrapped creatures fled they met a curving sweep of flame. Many swooned and died. Others fought their way to the windows or the elevator or fell fighting for a chance at the fire escape, the single fire escape leading into the blind court that was to be reached from the upper floors by clambering over a window sill! On all of the three floors, at a narrow window, a crowd met death trying to get out to that one slender fire escape ladder.

It was a fireproof building in which this enormous tragedy occurred. Save for the three stories of blackened windows at the top, you would scarcely have been able to tell where the fire had happened. The walls stood firmly. A thin tongue of flame now and then licked around a window sash. On the ledge of a ninth-story window two girls stood silently watching the arrival of the first fire apparatus. Twice one of the girls made a move to jump. The other restrained her, tottering in her foothold as she did so. They watched firemen rig the ladders up against the wall. They saw the last ladder lifted and pushed into place. They saw that it reached only the seventh floor. For the third time, the more frightened girl tried to leap. The bells of arriving fire wagons must have risen to them. The other girl gesticulated in the direction of the sounds. But she talked to ears that could no longer hear. Scarcely turning, her companion dived head first into the street. The other girl drew herself erect. The crowds in the street were stretching their arms up at her shouting and imploring her not to leap. She made a steady gesture, looking down as if to assure them she would remain brave. But a thin flame shot out of the window at her back and touched her hair. In an instant her head was aflame. She tore at her burning hair, lost her balance, and came shooting down upon the mound of bodies below. From opposite windows spectators saw again and again pitiable companionships formed in the instant of death—girls who placed their arms around each other as they leaped. In many cases their clothing was flaming or their hair flaring as they fell.

By eight o’clock the available supply of coffins had been exhausted, and those that had already been used began to come back from the morgue. By that time bodies were lowered at the rate of one a minute, and the number of patrol wagons became inadequate, so that four, sometimes six, coffins were loaded upon each. At intervals throughout the night the very horror of their task overcame the most experienced of the policemen and morgue attendants at work under the moving finger of the searchlight. The crews were completely changed no less than three times.

Source: New York World, 26 March 1911. Reprinted in Allon Schoener, Portal to America: The Lower East Side, 1870–1925 (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1967), 171–172.

]]> http://firehistory.org/2011/02/miscellaneous-photographs/feed/ 0 http://firehistory.org/2011/02/781/ http://firehistory.org/2011/02/781/#comments Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:36:26 +0000 admin http://firehistory.org/?p=781

CHICAGO, IL – 4 Firefighters were fatally injured in an explosion and subsequent structural collapse while fighting a fire in a four story office and warehouse building at 320 North LaSalle Street. Those killed were Lieutenant John Schuberth of Engine 42, Firefighter John P. Gleason of Engine 42, and Firefighter Henry T. Dyer of  Engine 11. Chicago Insurance Patrol Firefighter Patrick Milott died a few days later of injuries sustained at the scene. Seven other firefighters and two civilians were injured by the blast.

The fire began in the lower levels of the 75 year old building, before spreading through the elevator shafts to the upper floors. The fire was reported to the Chicago Fire Department around 2:04 PM, after which a 5-11 and subsequent special alarms were eventually ordered. The smoke and flames emitting from the structure could be seen for miles around and drew crowds of spectators to the scene. After burning for thirty minutes, however, the fire caused a substantial explosion that toppled a wall onto firefighters operating hoselines on fire escapes and ladders in an alley outside the building.

The special alarms brought 68 pieces of equipment to the site, including all but one of the department’s ambulances. In order to allow the fireboats to navigate the river, the La Salle Street Bridge remained up for 54 hours as the fire burned. More than 300 firefighters were on the scene and as many members of the local law enforcement worked to control the crowds. Firefighters stayed on the scene for several days as the fire reignited periodically in the rear area of the wreckage.

The explosion was initially blamed on fifty-five gallons of lacquer thinner in storage on the fourth floor of the warehouse, but later investigations showed that the explosion had probably been caused by excessive dust circulating through the elevator shafts. Witnesses later confirmed that the dust contained combustible materials such as paint particles. Property damages from the fire were estimated at $1.5 million.

LIBERTYVILLE, IL – Firefighter Del Ahrens and Assistant Chief Fred Stocke places supplies in the first aid and utility truck.

CHICAGO, IL – A Firefighter runs along the railroad tracks as smoke and sparks billow toward him from a blaze at 364 North Hardin. Barrels of Magnesium fed the blaze, which injured 2 civilians. Fireballs from the explosion traveled up to 100′  the air.

CHICAGO, IL – A discharged mental patient and 5 Firefighters were killed when fire turned a the skid row Reliance Hotel collapsed crushing the 6 victims. A total 28 Firefighters were buried with many over 13 hours in near zero weather. The 6 dead Firefighters were Captain Nicholas Schmidt (Battalion Commander 107) , Firefighter Robert Jordan of Truck 2, Firefighter Robert Shaak of Hook & Ladder 19, Firefighter George Malik of Engine 34, and Firefighter John Jarose of Engine 31. The picture above shows the removal of surviving Firefighter John Meisner.

DETROIT, MI – This overturned car was set ablaze by rioters during Detroit Race Riots in 1943.

MAYWOOD, IL – Firefighters work in the smoldering ruins of the Center Volkswagen-Mazda dealership garage in Maywood. The entire garage behind the main offices at 415 Roosevelt Road in the western suburb was gutted and the roof caved in destroying at least 18 vehicles inside.

EAST CHICAGO, IL – Heavy, oily black, carbon filled clouds were a staple for weeks during the Summer of ’94. A tire shredding facility caught fire and burned thousands of tons of shredded tires before being brought under control.