On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory killing 146 women in what is known as the worst factory fire in the history of New York City. The company employed young immigrant women, and they panicked when they discovered locked exit doors and inadequate fire escapes. To escape the fire, 30 women jumped from ninth story windows, and witnesses heard repeated thuds as the bodies hit the pavement.

Despite a no smoking policy, investigators found several cigarette cases around the origin of the fire. It was determined that a smoker threw a lit match into a wastebasket near some oil cans, and the abundance of highly flammable fabrics and patterns fueled the fire.

Workers quickly threw buckets of water on the fire, but their efforts had no recognizable effect. One shipping clerk grabbed a fire hose, but there was no water pressure. The blaze was beyond their control.

The fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch building, where the factory occupied the top three floors of the 10-story building. Everyone on the eighth floor swiftly escaped to safety below. Of the 70 employees on the 10th floor, all but one made their way to the roof.

In the neighboring building, “Professor Frank Sommer was teaching his class at the New York University Law School when he saw dozens of hysterical Shirtwaist workers stumbling around on the roof below. Sommer and his students found ladders left by painters and placed them so as to allow the escaping employees to climb to the school roof. The last 10th floor worker saved was an unconscious girl with smoldering hair who was dragged up the ladder,” according to a University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School Web site.

Most workers on the ninth floor were trapped in the inferno. A few managed to exit by the fire escape before it collapsed. A few others filled the elevator to capacity, while several desperate workers slid down the cables to the elevator the elevator roof. The weight capacity was exceeded leaving the elevator inoperable.

Several died while they tried to force open locked exit doors, and others jumped to their deaths. Although firemen arrived at the scene six minutes after the fire began, their ladders only extended to the sixth floor and their safety nets failed when three or four girls jumped together.

One eyewitness, a United Press reporter, described the scene, “Up in the ninth floor girls were burning to death before our very eyes. Down came the bodies in a shower, burning, smoking – flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward. They had fought each other to die by jumping instead of by fire,” according to a Cornell Web site.

Two weeks after the fire, a grand jury indicted the company owners on charges of manslaughter. Witnesses testified that the owners contributed to some of the deaths by keeping the doors locked to prevent employee theft, but the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

“Public outrage over the horrific loss of life at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory led to the creation of a nine-member Factory Investigating Commission,” according to the University of Missouri Web site. The investigators conducted an examination of safety and working conditions of New York factories, and 36 new laws were enacted to reform the state labor code.

Sources:

http://www.law.umkc.edu

http://www.yale.edu

http://www.ilr.cornell.edu

http://www.law.umkc.edu

http://www.cr.nps.gov