Daily Kennebec Journal

141 DEAD!
(Continued from Page One)

approach to the pier, taking away those
who had been claimed.
The air went stale with an odor of
burnt flesh and for a time the pier was
cleared. During the brief recess heavy-
eyed attendants rearranged the baskets
of personal effects belonging to the vic-
tims. There was more than $100 in cash
in the pockets and purses of the dead.
One woman had $500 in her stocking.
Hospital doors were stormed by hun-
dreds during the day and night. A cutter
whose sister worked a few feet away
from him in the doomed factory inquired
for her every half hour at St. Vincent's
hospital. She died between his visits and
he became so violent that the police had
to restrain him. He and she had planned
to come their aged parents from Rus-
sia this week. The parents are on the
way now. A woman and girl who lay
dying side by side whispered to sympa-
thetic nurses their stories of the disaster,
talking rapidly as if fearful that death
would check the recital. The girl died
murmuring her gruesome tale; the wo-
man lingered, became delirious and beg-
ged the nurses to relieve her.
"Why am I here?" she moaned as she
slipped back into a troubled sleep which the
surgeons said would be her last. "What
have I done?"
The coroner and the grand jurymen be-
gan their investigation today before the
embers died in the burned building. They
touched shoulders with the district at-
torney's men, building department agents,
Fire Chief Croker, Commissioner Waldo
and their helpers. There will be a thor-
ough probing and a fixing of the blame, if
blame there be, and it can be fixed. Said
District Attorney Whitman:
"If what Chief Croker tells me is
correct then some one is criminally li-
able and whoever it is whether it be
one or a dozen, shall be prosecuted. I
never saw anything more horrible in
my life."
"There are many buildings in this
city in which even worse conditions
prevail," declared Commissioner Wal-
do. "On this building there was only
one outside iron balcony fire escape
with treads 18 inches wide and so con-
structed that persons entering on the
fire escapes by windows would have to
close the iron shutters before they
could escape. There were two enclosed
fireproof stairs, only sufficiently wide
for one person to descend at a time
and with winding steps at the turns.
Entrance to the stairs were blocked
by partitions. From indications gates
and doors appeared to have been lock-
ed at the time of the fire."
The building itself, said Commis-
sioner Waldo, seemed to comply with
the law governing the erection of fire-
proof structures. The owner of the
building, J. J. Asch of South Norwalk,
Ct., apparently had observed the reg-
ulations of the building department,
he said.
New York, March 25.--One hundred
and forty-eight souls—nine-tenths of
them girls from the East Side—were
crushed to death on the pavements,
smothered in smoke or shriveled crisp
in a factory fire this afternoon in the
worst disaster New York has known
since the steamship Gen. Slocum was
burned to the water's edge off North
Brother's island in 1904, when 1020 per-
persons, mostly women and children, per-
ished.
There was not an outside fire escape
on the building.
How the fire started will perhaps
never be known. A corner on the
eighth floor was its point of origin and
the three upper floors only were swept.
On the ninth floor 50 bodies were
found; 63 or more were crushed to
death by jumping and more than 30
clogged the elevator shafts. The loss
to property will not exceed $100,000.
It was the most appalling horror
since the Slocum disaster and the
Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago. Every
available ambulance in Manhattan was
called upon to cart the dead to the
morgue—bodies charred to unrecog-
nizable 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 esti-
mate of the number of the employees
at work is made by Chief Croker at
about 1000. The proprietors of the
company say 700 men and girls were
in the place.
Whatever the number, they had no
chance of escape. 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.
Wayfarers on the opposite side of the street
shaded their eyes against the setting sun
and saw the windows of the three upper
floors of the building black with girls
crowding to the sills.
There were no
fire escapes.
"Don't jump, don't jump!" yelled the
crowd. But the girls had no choice.
The pressure of the maddened hundreds
behind them and the urging of their own
fears were too strong.
Four alarms were rung within 15 min-
utes. Before the engines could respond,
before the nets could be stretched or the
ladders raised, five girls had fallen from
the eighth and ninth floors so heavily that
they broke through iron roofs of the sub-
cellars and crashed through the very
streets into the vaults below.
In an hour the fire was out; in half an
hour it had done its worst; probably the
death list was full in 20 minutes.
The building stands on a corner, with
exposure on two sides, but the only fire
escape was on the interior, opening on a
light and air shaft. In all there were sev-
en exits, the single fire escape, two
freight elevators at the rear, two pas-
senger elevators in front and two stair-
ways. All of them proved almost useless,
and practically all who escaped either
climbed to the roof and scrambled thence
to the roof of the building occupied by
the American Book company adjoining,
or fled in the first rush for safety before
the crush and smoke grew too thick.
The building stands tonight with shell
intact and barely scarred, and it is im-
possible for one who did not see it to im-
agine how the flames in so short space
could have wrought such havoc.
Seven hundred hands, 500 of them
women, were employed by the shirtwaist
company. They sat in rows at their whir-
ring machines, the tables before them
piled with flimsy cloth, the floors littered
with lint, the air itself full of flying
inflammable dust.
The first rush of flame was almost an
explosion. Operators died in their chairs,
their lungs seared by inhaling flame.
Others were crowded into the elevator
shafts after the cars had made their last
trip. Still others were pushed off the in-
adequate interior fire escape.
In such a horrible stream did the bodies
overflow from the windows that the fire
nets, stretched by the first companies to
arrive, were soon gorged beyond capacity.
Twelve bodies weighted one net to the
bursting point, but the bodies kept on
raining to the pavement, through mesh-
es that could no longer support them.
Two women fell into the net at almost
the same moment. The strands parted
and the two were added to the death list.
A girl threw her pocketbook, then her
hat, then her furs from a tenth floor win-
dow. A moment later her body came
whirling after them to death.
At a ninth-floor window a man and a
woman appeared. The man embraced the
woman and kissed her. Then he hurled
her to the street and jumped. Both
were killed. Five girls smashed a pane
of glass, dropped in a struggling tangle
and were crushed into a shapeless mass.
A girl on the eighth floor leaped for a
fireman's ladder which reached only to
the sixth floor. She missed, struck the
edge of a life net and was picked up
with her back broken.
One girl jumped into a horse blanket
held by firemen and policemen. The
blanket ripped like cheesecloth and her
body was mangled almost beyond recog-
nition. Another dropped into a tarpaulin
held by three men. Her weight tore
it from their grasp and she struck the
street, breaking almost every bone in her
body.
Almost at the same moment a man
somersaulted down upon the shoulders of
a policeman holding the tarpaulin. He
glanced off, struck the sidewalk and was
picked up dead.
Within the building a man on the eighth
floor stationed himself at the door of one
of the elevators and with a club kept
back the girls who had stampeded to the
wire cage. Thirty were admitted to the
car at a time. They were rushed down
as fast as possible.
The call for ambulances was followed
by successive appeals for police, until
nearly 600 bluecoats had reached the
scene. Five hundred patrolmen drew a
line two blocks in each direction from
the burning building, and coped with a
crowd numbering tens of thousands—a
mixture of the morbidly curious and of
half-crazed relatives and friends of the
victims.
A hundred mounted policemen found it
necessary to charge the crowd repeatedly
to keep them back.
Led by Fire Chief Croker, a squad of
firemen stormed the stairways and gain-
ed access to the building at 7 o'clock.
Beams of two searchlights from build-
ings opposite played on the building,
lighting the way of the fire fighters as
they ascended to the top floors.
Fifty roasted bodies were found on
the ninth floor. They lay in every
posture, some so charred that recogni-
tion was impossible, some with the
death agony still on their features. A
half dozen were nude, with their flesh
hanging in shreds to their bones.
Women with their hair burned away,
with here and there a limb burned en-
tirely off and the charred stump visi-
ble, were lifted tenderly from the debris,
wrapped in oilcloth and lowered by
pulleys to the street.
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 ma-
chines.
Nor were these—burned without a
chance to save themselves—the full ex-
pression of the awful thing that had
occurred. When the flames had shot
their way into the elevator shaft so
that the brave young men in charge of
the cars no longer dared to go up for
fear the heat would snap the cables,
men and boys by the dozen, utterly
crazed, threw themselves into this shaft.
There was no reason in it. They were
sure to perish. But it was the only
place of escape from the red hell be-
hind. It was the only place they could
breathe.
Madly they flung themselves down
the shaft. It offered just another breath
of life. Police and firemen turned away
sick at the sight of these elevator shafts
piled with the outflung, distorted bodies
of the dead.
On the tenth floor of the building
adjoining the burning structure is the
law department of the New York Uni-
versity. Here 20 odd students were
listening to a lecture on law by Frank
H. Sommer, former sheriff of Essex
county, New Jersey. Prof. Sommer
saw the smoke, saw the human fire-
brands falling like rain and saw the
girls trapped on the roof.
He led his class to the roof of the
university quarters. There they found
two ladders. The boys seized these,
bore them down two flights to the roof
of an intervening building, swarmed
out of the windows and raised them to
the roof of the burning structure.
Forty girls were brought down to
safety.
There were so many spectacular in-
cidents, so many horrible scenes, so
much pathos and suffering, that the
minds of onlookers were stunned.
Across the street there rested on the
sidewalk 100 pine coffins, in which
were placed the bodies. As fast as
this was done the coffins were carried
away in patrol wagons, automobiles—
any kind of vehicle that could be
pressed into service—to the morgue
at Bellevue hospital and to the Chari-
ties Pier Morgue, opened for the first
time since the Slocum horror. As each
coffin was borne away, a policeman
shouted to the hushed crowd of thous-
ands a description of the victim and
of the trinkets found in the clothing.
Long after the fire was out and
every window sill of the three fatal
floors dripped rivulets of water, the
gruesome work of recovery went on.
Two blinding beams from searchlight
engines below threw it all in pitiless
relief.
Ropes swung from the roof would
tighten and something black would
sway uncertainly from a window,
shooting downward in groping plunges,
then through the huddled tarpaulins
could be made out a woman's form.
One hundred and six bodies had been
taken from the building and 20 injured
had been whirled away to St. Vincent's
hospital at 10 o'clock. Of these three
died soon after admittance.
Others were not expected to live the
night. Three of five women taken to
Bellevue hospital died soon after ad-
mittance there. Dozens of the dead
and dying were aflame when they
struck the sidewalks.
To extinguish these fires, a volun-
teer bucket brigade was formed, whose
members worked amid falling bodies
in imminent peril of their own lives.
A score of blazes were extinguished in
this manner.
Ambulance surgeons worked heroic-
ally with the maimed and dying and
wherever there was a show of life in
the surviving forms, they were lifted
into ambulances and hurried away.