Girls Leap From Windows.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 2902, 17 January 1911, Page 3

Girls Leap From Windows.

TWENTY-TWO KILLED IN A FIEKCE FIRE. Twenty-two girls were killed and forly injured in a terrible fire which occurred recently at a paper-box and lamp-shade factory in Newark, New Jersey Two hundred persons, nearly all girls, were employed in tli« fourstorey building. Of these fifty were on the top floor. The staircases were wooden and the fin: escapes inadequate. The fire started in some rubbish at tha b«c!{ of the second fiVr and spiead with great rapidity. Within e few minutes the stairs were impassable. Within 20 minutes the building was in flames from the cellar to the roof. The women started leaping from every window into the crowd which was already assembling before the firemen could spread their life-net*. The firemen, when they did arrive, worked rapidly and saved scores of the women by ladders. Almost all the fatalities and injuries occurred before their arrival. One by stander says he saw twelve girls killed on the pavement in as many minutes. The firemen were unable to enter the building, and half an hour after the fire started the roof and walls fell, so that the faint hope of saving any persons left in the building was lost. Some of the victims were so charred by the flames or injured by their fall on the pavement so as to be unrecognisable.