HOSPITAL DEATH-TRAP.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 138, 13 June 1929, Page 20

HOSPITAL DEATH-TRAP.

CLEVELAND CLINIC DISASTER.

EYE-WITNESSES' accounts.

SUFFERING AND HEROISM.

(From On* Own Correspondent.)

SAX FRANCISCO, May 18,

•. America's hospital disaster at Cleveland, when a terrible loss of life occurred through the gas explosion in the Clinic Hospital, ranked as one of the worst calamities ever chronicled in the; country's annals, and the stories qf eyewitnesses -were full of pathos, the awful event having no parallel in the history of of the United States.

: "She was horribly burned. The gas attacks the tissues; she was bleeding at the mouth and nose and eyes. She couldn't speak at all, but Oh, Gold help her! She was conscious!

"She was conscious for two hours. For two hours I worked over her, there on the hospital lawn. And then —then, at the last—her raw, bleeding lips twisted themselves into a smije. And I felt her squeezes my hand, and—and so—she died."

That was the story told upon his return to Chicago with the body of his Wife Florence by Dr. William G. Epstein, oho of the best-known surgeons in St. Bernard's Hospital, and a survivor of the Cleveland Clinic Hospital disaster. ,'. fT left .her in the hospital, where she was to be examined, and I went out and went over to another building about 200 ft away;' I was-in there when the explosion occurred. It was a terrific blast. My first thought was for my wife. I ran rike a madman to the hospital building. I could see the yellowish black gas rolling out of the windows. I—l didn't know what it was then —and I didn't care. A11 ; T -knew—all'-1 could think of —was that Florence was in there. There were screams —terrible screams — coming from the building. .All around me people were running toward the place. The discipline in the hospital must have bfeen wonderful. Indeed, nmy I think of it,-: it was even more than that —it-was stark heroisni. ■'■: '* ■.'.-.' * >.'. .'"«....' ; ; -'V

Rescuers Worked Frantically. ■* ''Remember, I was in a building only 20Dft away; and I was .■running like mad. X&t by the tiiiie I reached the entrance fertile hospital— by/ "the time I had covered those <200ft—the rescue • work already had begun, and nurses, [doctors !\hjtl internes who .had escaped 1 the gas Were staggering out with the-victims'. I rushed past them . into the building. .liuckily I hadibeen there before;several tsmes, and knew my way around? I knew where to find my wife. .1 rushed into the room. She—she was lying on the floor. iite cloud of gas had passed over 'her. She —her appearance—oh, it—it was too horrible to describe! And—and so I fiiind her. She .couldn't speak. I carried h*e£ out to the. lawn outside the building. There were scores of others there already. The place was a welter of blood and strangled groans and screams. f 2|Yes, there I was, in the very shadow of "one of the best-known hospitals in America—in the centre of a city of nearly 2,00.0;000 people—me;! me! —a stir-" g'eon. And my wife dying —dreadfully — anfl there \ Wasn't anything I could do!"

m * Gas Blocked Escape. si -i • '-_•.•.,■_• >,; i ,r*i. ... &. . ..■-' .- . IA dull, rumbling explosion, heavy dark cipjuds of irritating smoke curling Upward, then women's screams, the crash of-heavy beams and death —this was the gtim picture of the catastrophe Avhich Dr. Henry J. John, clinic diabetic specialist;; carried with him. '■''I was in my office," said Dr. John, "when suddenly .there came a 'dull, rumbling ...report. Then up from the floor near the radiator at my window, heavy nauseating smoke and fumes began to pour out. I tried to make my way to the, window, but the stench of the bromide gas drove me back. As I ran fof- the door women began to scream. patients run for the windows; only to'bc driven back, like I Avas, by the fumes pouring up from the openings hi the floor near the radiator. Luckily for nie. my office was not far from the outer door. I fought my way through the snioke. People were choking, screaming, fighting & or'•> their lives.. Some who dashed through the fumes with me later cpllapsed and died. The building seemed to flare up like so much tinder. Fire and heavy brown fumes were everywhere."

!,"Trappe,d, in..the small rooms, with only one 'window each, the patients saw their lone hope—the open windows — dashed from them because the fumes poured out of the crevices in the floor under the radiators, which were flush against- the windows. Their only chancev p w"p'uJd'';lia\'lft : "'beeiiVjia.get 'to- the windows, but the gas drove them back," the physician said.

fei>R-^^Siiy-feM"*€Ji-d^-^if6- v c'eiiuloid films used in X-rays, which were believed to have caused the fire ,and blasts, were supposed . ttf be chemicajly treated -to, make them "infla'minable: ',";'; , ".,'''*

Some Patients Crushed. ■:■ After. Dr. John" made his way to safety "another rocked the building. Doctors ajid nurses ,; made lieroic .efforts to'-rescue 'the "invalid patients, some of whom were caught ill the mad panic and crushed against, the closed elevator .door. A yellow, powderlike substance, gathered everywhere in •the ruins of ;\the ■ flame-swept clinic building, and!.;told a mute but-graphic story of the death which overtook -more, than a'.hundred pei-sons."' Proin . basement tq'^yligh"ts,a' : thin layer of yellow dust settled, an aftei-math of the cloud, of gaseous vapour which • penetrated every cranny of-'the burning building' and killed,almost -all vyvho got- in con--tact vritEpift' who breathed it into theiritlrthgs, died' where; they, fell in writhing heaps £hi ; Railways, operating rooms and stairways. Others staggered out into'the open, where their skin, turned to, a ghastly greenish hue "and death overtook them. .

The.-,gas. struck quickly. , None who breath'eefcany; quantity :of . it lived to reach _ tfic~frcsh air, for which scores threw themselves in insane panic against closed elevator doors and walls. Throughout the gutted building were found traces of the desperate struggles .women. Blood stains oif" Walls 'anrr doors showed" the force with which the terror-ridden victims threw themselves at every faint chance io * each f resh- air'.'and drive out, the stilling yellow fumes which, were chok-. »'g them to death.

Founder a Hero. A kccn-Ryed, grey-haired man, h >.mired the world o ve>- for his medical ....... trudge.l slowly though the t-cLiu.like.many,, a . mail wllo ;; cuikd

heavy burden on his shoulders. He was Dr. George W. Crile, who had seen the institution which he brought into being made a death trap by some of the very scientific apparatus, with which he had laboured for years. Dr. Crile, famed for a host of medical advancements and honoured by the Governments of the United States, Great Britain and France, was in an operating room when the suffocating gas loosed by the burning X-ray films wiped out over 100 lives. He Was not informed of the tragedy until lie had completed his operation. Clad in his white uniform, he stepped to the lawn of the hospital and took command of treatment of the victims. "They're all gassed. It's a film gas," he clipped out, and then plunged into a battle hardly less terrible than the horrors he experienced while serving with the Lakeside medical unit of the American Expeditionary Forces during the world war.

A nurse, almost lifeless, who had served with him in France, was lying on the grass. Dr. John' Phillipps, an associate of Dr. Crile, was among the fatally stricken. Dr. Crile performed a blood transfusion operation in a futile effort to save his coworker's life. "Clear the way. Give them' more air," Dr. Crile shouted. "'Have we oxygen enough?" "Firemen, more firemen." He spoke crisply but calmly. Two hours later all the bodies had been removed and he went back to the hospital to supervise and organise relief work there.

Dr. Crile invented the system of blood transfusion, commonly used to-day. He did much -to improve the value of adrenalin as medicine, conducted successful experiments with . heart massaging and perfected the famous "nerve block" system of anaesthesis, by which operations are performed without the usual shock and clanger to the enrvous system.

Vain Fight For Air. Many persons were sittiiig by the dental room near the elevator waiting for their appointments, probably occupied with thoughts' of their troubles, when the yellow clouds of poison came billowing toward them. It came, perhaps, while they wondered what was wrong, and then, before they knew it, they were choking from the deadly fumes. They clutched their throats and gasped, for air, but there was only the suffocating odour. Screaming, they reeled and pounded on the elevator door, but there was no one to answer their call. Their bodies were found piled against the elevator entrance. As if mad, they had beaten and kicked at the doer. The glass of the slide guarding the shaft had been partly broken, seemingly in the vain hope that there might be air in the shaft.

Veritable Gas War. Firemen who carried the bodies out discovered them pitched forward toward the elevator door, many of them having died of convulsions, helpless to escape from the yellow gas. Others, sixteen of them, got as far as the landing on the third floor before they met the wall of fumes which choked them to death. The stairs were littered with women's hats and shoes. Firemen and policemen, every available man, Slurried out to the rescue. They carried the victims out over the roof, through windows and down ladders,' in any way they could. They shot streams of water inside to quench the flames, and the water turned a dirty yellowish brown as it settled and sloshed on the floors.

Many of the gassed, who, physicians said, experienced similar conditions to gas attacks in the World War, were carried out alive, only to die when the pure air of outdoors or oxygen artificially administered at hospitals failed to rid* their lungs of the poison fumes. "Believe it or not," said Frank Kilrain, one of the scores of taxi-cab drivers who worked incessantly carrying vie-

Tims throughout the afternoon, "as soon as they hit the air they turned

green." More than 300 persons were in the building when the first explosion occurred. Much official interest in the investigations was turned to the steel fire door to the storage department. The open door released the flames and sent the spiralling column of mustardcoloured gas up through the foyer to the roof.

The gas reached the foyer on the second floor through the staircases. There it rose through the open centre of the building to the roof, penetrating to examining rooms in the clinic from the balconies, which opened on the foyer below.

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