Today in Fire History 2/13
On 2/13/1909 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin the Johns Manville Manufacturing Company fire killed five firefighters and injured about a dozen more when the rear brick wall collapsed without warning at 225 Clybourne Street. “On arrival, firefighters found heavy fire showing from the first and second floors of a six-story brick asbestos factory. The building became fully involved in fire and firefighters fought the blaze from every available vantage point, including the roof of a piano factory to the rear. As firefighters attacked the fire, most of the front wall, from the second floor up, collapsed into the street. As the Assistant Chief went to the rear to get the men off the roof of the four-story piano factory, the rear wall of the fire building collapsed onto it, carrying numerous firefighters down through the top two floors of the structure. The dead and injured had to be lowered from the upper floor windows by ropes. Five members of the MFD were killed in the collapse of the wall and another member of Engine 19 was critically injured. He died on February 15th as a result of injuries sustained. It was discovered that the two top floors of the asbestos plant were added just several years before the fatal fire. The fire started when a worker was heating a "fireproof" varnish for coating pipes on a stove, and the container exploded, showering him with the flaming product. He ran from the building engulfed in flames before the arrival of firefighters.”
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On 2/13/1895 three Lynn, Massachusetts firefighters died “while operating at a fire on the first and second floors of a four-story frame hardware store. The fire rapidly shot through the roof and the building collapsed, burying twelve firefighters under tons of burning debris. One injured firefighter was quickly removed, but the remaining eleven had to be dug out by hand. Mutual aid was called to the scene to help with the rescue efforts and also combat the fire, which had now spread to two exposures. Within a half-hour, the remaining men were removed. Three were killed and the remaining nine firefighters were seriously injured, one who had his right hand cut off by an ax.”
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On 2/13/1901 an Appleton, Wisconsin firefighter “died of smoke inhalation at the Kimberly Clark Paper Mill fire.”
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On 2/13/1912 a Manhattan, New York (FDNY) firefighter died as a result of injuries he sustained while operating at an alarm.
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On 2/13/1914 a Duluth, Minnesota firefighter died at a fire in a two-story hide and skin warehouse. “He was operating with his company in heavy smoke on the second floor when he suddenly collapsed into the arms of his captain. Thinking that he was overcome by smoke, the captain enlisted the aid of several other firefighters to carry him to a window for air. Being unable to revive him, the men carried their fallen comrade from the burning building and took him into a candy factory across the street. Even after his pronouncement, fellow firefighters still worked to revive him, to no avail.”
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On 2/13/1922 a Manhattan, New York (FDNY) firefighter “died of smoke inhalation after returning to quarters, after operating at a fire at 104 Lenox Avenue.”
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On 2/13/1923 a Franklin, New Hampshire firefighter died while fighting a fire at the New Hampshire Orphans Home. At 3:30 a.m. Box 14 was sounded for a building fire. “There were sixty-one children in the nursery building, all under seven years of age. All were saved, and no injuries were reported among them. Firefighters, including the one who perished, were playing a stream of water into the nursery and were about to put up a ladder against the wall when it collapsed without warning. Because of the deep snow, the men had no chance to run from the falling bricks and were buried beneath the debris.”
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On 2/13/1939 a San Francisco, California firefighter died of injuries he received at the Desk Company fire, at 601 Mission.
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On 2/13/1957 a Brooklyn, New York (FDNY) firefighter died as a result of injuries sustained while operating at a two-alarm fire at Rockaway Avenue and Pacific Streets.
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On 2/13/1968 a Chicago, Illinois firefighter died after he was injured on February 7, 1968. “A series of explosions tore through a sausage factory and the general offices of the Mickelberry’s Food Products Company 50th & Halsted. A gasoline tanker truck, on-site to fill the company’s gasoline tanks, struck a garbage can while driving through an alley, knocking the valve off of the tanker’s discharge pipe. Gasoline poured out of the tanker, ran through an alley doorway, and into the basement of the sausage plant, where a boiler ignited the gasoline. The burning gasoline soon produced two small explosions that spread the fire and led to a buildup of gasoline fumes, which eventually caused a more powerful third explosion that destroyed the two-story general office sections of the building and demolished a portion of the sausage factory. Chicago firefighters had just arrived on the scene and were rescuing office and factory workers when the third explosion occurred. The explosion threw firefighters from their ladders and factory workers trapped on the roof fell into the rubble. Onlookers were showered with bricks, concrete, plaster, and glass, and windows as far away as three blocks were blown out. The explosion was so powerful that one section of glass block window was launched across the street, where it left an imprint in a brick building. Following the explosion, the Chicago Fire Department issued a 5-11 alarm that brought 300 firefighters to the scene. The massive response was not only due to the severity of the fire but also because of the number of casualties. Nine individuals, including four firefighters and the Mickelberry Company President, were killed and more than seventy people were taken to the hospital. Dozens more with injuries were treated at the scene.”
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On 2/13/1971 two Chicago, Illinois firefighters died while “fighting a fire inside the building housing A. A. Englebart, Inc., heating control and appliance dealer, when an explosion erupted, and the one-story building collapsed. Five other firefighters and four civilians were injured in the explosion and collapse. Firefighters were battling flames in the rear of the building when the explosion occurred. Some of the firefighters were blown out of the building by the explosion, and one firefighter reported that the force of the blast blew off some of his gear. The explosion demolished most of the building, scattering debris into the streets and neighboring apartments, and civilians more than one block away were treated for cuts from flying glass.”
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On 2/13/2016 a train trestle fire cut Amtrak route west of New Orleans, Louisiana in Saint Charles Parish. Firefighters used helicopters and airboats to fight the fire on a train trestle that was reported around 8:00 a.m. The trestle also carries four to eight freight trains a day.
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On 2/13/2016 a fire engulfed a building set to be Central Asia's tallest tower while it was still under construction in Kazakhstan in the Kazakh capital of Astana. When the fire department arrived, floors 11 to 25 were actively burning, in the 88-story, 1,250-foot-tall, tower. It took firefighters six hours to control the fire that is believed to have started on the 25th floor.
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On 2/13/2010 four children ages one, two, three, and four years old were killed in a Flint, Michigan apartment fire that started from unattended cooking.
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On 2/13/2010 a house fire killed four that started from a small heater placed too close to a bed in Phelan, Alabama.
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On 2/13/2005 the 32-story, 348’, Windsor Building in Madrid, Spain, caught fire and burned for two days; the building was completely engulfed in flames at one point. “The fire was first detected on the 21st floor and spread quickly throughout the entire building, leading to the collapse of the outermost, steel parts of the upper floors.”
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On 2/13/1983 seventy-four people were killed when a fire blazed through a cinema in Turin, Italy. A fire started on the ground floor of Statuto Cinema and quickly spread to seats covered in plastic that produced toxic smoke. The crowd panicked causing a stampede that crushed several people to death.
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On 2/13/1975 a fire on the seventh floor of the nine-story Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge in Peoria, Illinois forced the evacuation of 119 guests. The fire was confined to the room of origin; however, the door to the room was left open allowing smoke and heat to travel into the seventh-floor corridor creating an evacuation problem, also permitting smoke to enter one stair and migrate to the 8th and 9th floors.
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On 2/13/1939 nine hundred students fled coatless as fire swept the four-story brick high school building in the Bellefonte, Pennsylvania High School, a part of the town's residential district. Firefighters were unable to control the blaze which started in the boiler room and spread to the ventilating system, quickly filling classrooms with smoke. No one was injured.
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On 2/13/1936 the Lum's Chinese Restaurant fire in New York City, New York killed five and injured forty-one patrons. Panic rather than flames caused the deaths. Flames swept through the second-floor restaurant at 735 Lexington Avenue that started in a ground-floor haberdashery.
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On 2/13/1895 a gas explosion in Elwood, Indiana destroyed a city block and injured three in the very early hour of the morning.
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On 2/13/1885 eighteen of the 685 patients died in a fire at the Blackley Almshouse (an insane asylum) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on the west side of the Schuylkill River. The fire originated in the north 145’ X 60’ wing of the old portion on the east side of the main building containing sixty separate cells for violent patients, twenty on each floor.
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On 2/13/1799 the first state-level insurance regulatory act passes in Massachusetts.
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On 2/13/1899 – It was the coldest morning of record along the Gulf Coast. Temperatures dipped to 7 degrees above zero in New Orleans and Pensacola, and 1 below zero in Mobile. Tallahassee dipped to 2 below zero, a record that still stands years later as the coldest temperature ever recorded, as well as the only sub-zero temperature reading in the Sunshine State.
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2/13/1633 Italian philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome, facing charges of heresy for advocating the Copernican theory, that the Earth revolves around the Sun.