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A Half Hour Of Horror Research Paper

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A Half-Hour of Horror On March 25, 1911 about 146 people lost their lives. Many more people lost loved ones. This was the most tragic disaster of all time until 9/11. What happened you may ask, well it all started with one little cigarette butt, wicker baskets of cloth and flammable paper. On this terrible day the workers, never in their wildest dreams, thought they wouldn’t get to say goodbye or see their loved ones again. At approximately 4:40 PM in a scrap bin under one of the cutter’s table at the northeast corner of the eighth floor flames erupted. A bypasser on Washington Place saw smoke coming from the windows and notified the fire department at 4:45. There were many safety violations that were very dangerous …show more content…

These were for two passengers at a time, once again to prevent stealing. There were 4 elevators, two were locked, and one of the remaining two was covered by fire. That left one, one elevator that about 100 people tried to squeeze into. About 5 people died waiting for the elevator to return, but it never did. If the elevators were bigger, allowed more people into them, or more were unlocked, then once again many more may have survived. The fifth issue was the the doors, they opened the wrong way. The doors opened inwards, not out. So when there were about 150 people pushing and shoving to get out, they couldn’t get the doors open. At this point the building sounds more dangerous than the fire itself. The sixth and final issue was that once the door was opened it was blocked off by barrels of oil, yes flammable oil. They once again said it was to keep workers from leaving early and taking breaks. This is just one of those things that make you think, what makes the boss of this company block off the doors, that once again open inwards, with oil, very flammable oil. It just doesn’t make sense. These were some safety problems that the building had and caused more problems when the fire was actually started. To this day we still talk about this disaster, one of the biggest disasters in history. A half-hour of horror goes down in history, meaning in 30 minutes 146 people lost their lives and never saw

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