3/26/08

Triangle of death


Tri-O’s
Oddities, Observations, and Opinions By
Herb Kandel


It seems we all take for granted the environmental, zoning, and occupational hazard laws. Many did not usually evolve by dint of foresightedness but rather through tragedy. A case in point involves one that happened 97 years ago this week. It was Saturday March 25, 1911, about 4:40 in the afternoon. In five minutes the bell would clang on top floors 8, 9, and 10 to let the workers know that they could leave their sewing machines and other operating equipment. The overtime pay was a welcome addition to the employees who usually earned $6 a week. This was lower Manhattan in the Asch building and this factory made and assembled women¹s tailored shirts. The employees were mainly immigrant women, some as young as 15, mostly Italian, Jewish, Russian, and German. There were about 500 employed on those three floors and they worked for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company.
Then someone on the 8th floor shouted "Fire!"

The combustible materials burned rapidly and torched the overhead racks of the shirts in process. Smoke billowed out of the windows and fire quickly spread. The 27 water buckets proved useless in dousing the increasing flames. There was a rush to the two passenger elevators and the stairway. The door to the stairway opened in, not out. With the rush to get there the crowd defeated itself temporarily by blocking the space necessary to swing it in. They later were able to escape to street level some with clothes smoking others suffered major burns.

Meanwhile the 10 passenger elevator kept bringing down 12 -15 people at a time but the ring of fire on the upper floors still threatened hundreds. The elevator operator would later testify as he was descending in the shaft he heard the thumping of bodies hitting the top of the car. They plummeted from the 9th floor whose door was pried open. Police would later remove more than 30 corpses from atop the elevator, all were women.

Acts of bravery were reported. Three men formed a human chain from the 8th floor window to the adjacent window next door. Some girls were able to cross over on the backs of the three. But then the men lost their balance. All three fell 80 feet to join those on the pavement. At first bystanders thought that bolts of fabric were being tossed out of the windows to save the material but the bolts were soon realized to be bodies.

On the 9th floor the stairway doors were locked (it was said to prevent materials from being stolen). The fire escape was useless and collapsed under the load of the workers. The inferno there was the area that claimed the most lives. The firefighters arrived from six blocks away. Within 15 minutes it became a four alarm fire. Pumps did not have the power to propel the water to the top floors. Ladders were extended which only reached the mid 6th floor, some jumped toward them in hope of grabbing a rung near the top. None did.

A New York Times report described five girls by a window, "They leaped together, clinging to each other, with fire streaming back from their hair and dresses".

Lifenets were stretched but multiple bodies landing at the same time proved a disaster. It seemed to be raining girls as they chose the window exit rather than burn alive. Again, the New York Times, "Few of the girls that fell from the windows on the ninth floor, it was learned, jumped of their own accord. They were pushed forward by the panic stricken crowd in the room behind them." The report continued, "The crowd yelled 'Don't jump!' but it was jump or be burned the proof of which is found in the fact that fifty burned bodies were taken from the ninth floor alone."

Those on the 10th floor fared better. They escaped to the roof. Next door was New York University Law School. It was 15 foot higher than the Asch building. Seeing the commotion on the roof a teacher and his students found ladders left by painters. They lowered them to the roof below allowing the 70 or so workers to climb to safety. All but one person survived from the 10th floor.


The fire was under control in less than 30 minutes. It claimed the lives of 146 people. The building itself, steel and concrete, showed hardly any signs of the disaster yet it had experienced four recent fires and had been cited as unsafe because of the deficiency of exits. There is still no definitive cause of the fire, most believed a cigarette or match landed on the cluttered floor. The owners were acquitted of wrongdoing. In civil suit they were made to pay $75 to each of the twenty three families who had sued them.

This workplace disaster was the largest in New York history until 9/11 but because of it new laws were enacted: fire codes, safety and occupational standards, workers compensation, and a myriad other statutes for the benefit and welfare of the public along with stiff penalties for non-compliance. It still sadly exemplifies why government mandate Law in the wake of catastrophes such as Triangle Shirtwaist Company.

http://www.baldwincountynow.com/articles/2008/03/26/columnists/doc47e97564451b2651060365.txt