- Joined
- Jan 2, 2017
children. the majority of those attending that night were children.While on the subject, the Coconaut Grove is only the second-deadliest structure fire, in terms of loss of life, in US history.
The grim record holder was the fire at the Iroquois Theater in Chicago, December 30th, 1903.
The final death toll, a staggering 602.
An electrical fire started backstage during a standing-room-only performance that afternoon and quickly grew into a conflagration as it rapidly consumed the cloth backdrops and stage drapery. While standard practice was to have a fireproof asbestos curtain lowered to protect the audience, the curtain in this case got hung up halfway.
When one of the performers in a panic to escape opened a rear door behind the stage the rush of air blew a wall of flame into the audience. The wooden seats and flammable decorations then all caught, becoming an unstoppable inferno.
Everything that could go wrong, then did go wrong. Many of the exit doors had been locked to prevent people sneaking in without a ticket, those that had not either opened inwards or had non-standard "bascule" latches, not knobs or crash bars. In the dark and panic, these proved impossible to open. Firemen later tasked with removing the bodies said they were ten deep against the doors in places.
A group that managed to get one door high above the third balcony to open found that it opened into.... thin air. The building's fire escape had never been installed, leaving them to plummet three stories to their deaths in the alley below as the crush of the crowd pushed them off the ledge.
Sprinklers and fire buckets were nonexistent as well, the only "firefighting" apparatus were a few small hand-held dry chemical extinguishers meant for putting out a burning trash can at best and utterly useless. There wasn't even a fire alarm on-site, someone had to run down the outside sidewalk to a nearby fire box to call in the disaster.
An investigation discovered that the supposedly "fireproof" asbestos curtain was really made from cotton and other combustible materials. It would have never saved anyone at all. In addition to not having any fire alarms in the building, the owners had decided that sprinklers were too unsightly and too costly and had never had them installed.
To make matters worse, the management also established a policy to keep non-paying customers from slipping into the theater during a performance -- they had quietly padlocked accordion-style gates at the top of the interior stairways. And just as tragic was the idea they came up with to keep the audience from being distracted during a show. They ordered all of the exit lights to be turned off.
The investigation led to a cover-up by officials from the city and the fire department, who denied all knowledge of fire code violations. They blamed the inspectors, who had overlooked the problems in exchange for free theater passes. A grand jury indicted a number of individuals, including the theater owners, fire officials and even the mayor. No one was ever charged with a criminal act. Families of the dead filed nearly 275 civil lawsuits against the theater but no money was ever collected.
plenty of them died in crushes rather than flames. so grim.
