WORLD'S GREAT FIRES

Taranaki Daily News, 8 October 1928, Page 14

WORLD'S GREAT FIRES

MADRID’S THEATRE DISASTER, OTHER TRAGEDIES RECALLED. Madrid’s theatre fire disaster with its tragic loss of somewhere about 500 lives, is not the worst on record, for in the Iroquois theatre fire in Chicago on December 30, 1903, no less than 587 bodies were recovered and 300 more persons who had attended the performance were missing, with no identifiable remains. This theatre waa not an old and out-of-date building like that now destroyed in Madrid, but a fine modern structure modelled on the Opera Comique in Paris, and built at a cost of £210,000; A pantomime was being played at the time, and some flimsy stage scenery caught fire. A move was at once made to lower the fire-proof curtain, but it would not work, and thereafter panic reigned, and the whole building was soon an inferno of flame. The heaviest loss of life occurred on the stairs from the upper balconies, the bodies being piled twelve feet thick at the foot of them. It was after this fire that it became the rule, nearly all over the world to raiso and lower the safety curtain at every theatrical performance to make sure it was always in good working order. Tbo most disastrous theatre fire re-

cently recorded was at the little village of Dromcollogher, near Limerick in Ireland. In a loft over a garage some 200 people were packed tightly to see a kinema show one evening in September, 1926, when fire broke out and 47 perished.

About the worst kinema fire on record was at a very early kinema exhibition given at a charity bazaar in Paris on May 4, 1897. The primitive kinematograph machine depended on its illumination of a lamp of ether which exploded, and soon the temporary wooden building in which the show was being given was a mass of raging flames. Nearly all fashionable Paris was patronising the bazaar, and about 130 people, mostly society ladies, perished. Among the many notable victims was the Duchess d’Alcon, sister of the then Empress of Austria, the Duchess losing her life in her fearless efforts to save others.

More disastrous than any of the above theatre fires was the fire of the New York excursion steamer General Slocum in 1904. This three-decked vessel was proceeding up through Hell Gate with about 1200 children and 900 adults on board and bands playing, when a fire broke out in the cook’s galley, and soon got out of control. As the current waa too strong and the coast too rocky to beacli the steamer at once, the captain went ahead for the first good beach. Other vessels rushed alongside and took off people until they themselves were afire, and hundreds jumped into the water. Finally, when the vessel was beached, stranding some distance from

the shore, the crowded hurricane deck collapsed into the furnace below, and the greatest number of victims were killed at' the moment when safety seemed at hand. Twelve hundred lives were lost altogether, a great number of those being children. Another great holocause of children occurred at Cleveland, Ohio, in 1908, when the Lake View School at Collinwood was burned in May, 1908. Of the 360 children in the school, about 200 tost their lives, the death-roll including nine teachers. Three years later New York had 150 dead in the fire in the Triangle shirt-waist factory, when tlie three upper floors of a ten-story building took fire. The victims were mostly Irish, Italian, and Hungarian girls. Very great heroism was displayed on this occasion by the elevator boys, who kept on going up with the lifts to the burning floors and saving lives until the lift cables fused and the machinery became unworkable.

The biggest loss of life at any fire in the world is said to have occurred in the much-burned city of Moscow. This was not on the famous occasion of Napoleon’s entry in 1812 —the fire then not being a heroic deed of self-sacrifice by the Russians, but an accident—but away back in 1571.

Moscow at that period of its history had been having a round of bad luck, and the Tartar Khan of the Crimea thought it a good time to attack it, and having attacked it he decided to fire it. Pretty well the whole city was burned, and of its 200,000 inhabitants, only 30,000

remained. Such are the figures recorded in Russian annals. In the great fire of London nearly a century later, although 13,200 houses were destroyed and an immense number of people rendered homeless, only eight lives were lost. When Mrs. O’Leary’s famous cow kicked over the lamp in her barn on the evening of October 8, 1871, and Chicago went up in smoke, some 20,000 buildings were swept away over an area of 2100 acres. But although 100,000 people were rendered homeless and property worth about £30,000,000 or £40,000,060 destroyed, the loss of life did not amount to more than 200 souls.