Beyond the Flames – Fire Played Major Role in Updating Fire Safety in Schools

As we continue our series on some of the worst fires in American history, this week’s column leads us to two of the most tragic of fires – those involving schools filled with children. We’ll look at the New London School incident in 1937 and the Our Lady of The Angels tragedy in 1958.
The first of these incidents took place in March of 1937 in the small mining town of New London, Tex. The town, despite being caught up in the Great Depression economic downturn, was a prosperous place to live in Texas, and due to its revenue from local oil fields, had one of the most lucrative budgets in the entire Southwest.
This budget, of course, granted a large amount of money for education, and the New London school district constructed a brand new school at the cost of $1 million ($15.5 million in today’s money). The new building was state-of-the-art, built with high qualities of concrete and steel materials. The construction also included the building of a football stadium with electric lights, the first stadium in the state with electric-powered light.
The building, however, was building on a sloping area, and rather than leveling the area out, the school board and construction team decided to build in that location anyway, creating a large dead space under the building. The construction team had urged the school to install a boiler and steam distribution system, but the school board chose to install gas heaters throughout the building and tap into the local oil field’s natural gas instead. These factors would eventually lead to a tragic end.
On March 18, nearly 600 students and teachers were in the building when at approximately 3:10 p.m. local time, a teacher in the manual training classroom turned on an electric sander, which is believed to have caused a spark that ignited the gas mixture that had built up in the dead space beneath the building for some time, due to the more construction and stability of the school’s gas lines.
The explosion was catastrophic, lifting the entire roof of the structure before it came crashing back down and leveled a large portion of the structure. The explosion could be heard for nearly a dozen miles, and surrounding citizens rushed to the scene to find out what had happened. A local PTA meeting was being held in a nearby building, and many parents were on scene almost immediately.
Rescue workers and average citizens alike search through the rubble for days to rescue any survivors and recovered the bodies of those not so fortunate. News reporters from various newspapers, which were sent to report on the incident often, found themselves as part of the rescue crew, with one reporter later stating “We identified ourselves as reporters, and were quickly put to work as rescuers. They needed rescuers far more than reporters.”
In all, over 300 students and teachers were killed in the blast, with over 150 more seriously injured. Fortunately, the elementary students that were enrolled in the school had been dismissed early that day, sparing hundreds of students from serious injury or death. The incident remains the deadly incident in a school setting in United States history.
The next school tragedy received much more publicity than that of the New London incident, mostly because of its location in Chicago, one of America’s biggest cities, and the mismanagement in code enforcement and fire safety.
The Our Lady of The Angels School in Chicago, Illinois was a large two story building in the heart of West Chicago on the site of a large Roman Catholic Parish. In addition to the school building, part of which was at one time the sanctuary for the church, a nun’s covenant, a new church, a rectory, and a separate kindergarten building were all in close proximity.
The school building itself consisted of three separate wings, forming a U-shaped structure, consisting of a basement in which the top of the basement was several feet above ground level, resulting in a raised first and second floors, making it a considerable height from the second floor windows to the ground level, a key part in the fire.
The school had several major flaws in fire safety, although it was technically considered “up to date” by the city of Chicago. Due to a grandfather clause in the fire codes of the city in 1949, Our Lady of the Angels was exempt from many of the new fire code enforcement laws. Some of the flawed fire safety features included glass over the door of each classroom (allowing smoke and flames to enter rooms freely once the heat broke windows), only one second-floor fire escape, faulty fire alarm systems, and no fire-blocking corridor doors to prevent the spread of fire from different part of the building.
At around 2 p.m. local time on Dec. 1, 1958, a fire began from an unknown cause in a cardboard trash barrel at the bottom of the north corridor stairwell on the basement level of the north wing. The fire went undetected for an estimated 20 to 30 minutes before several students returning from an errand for their teacher discovered the smoke on the second floor and notified their teacher.
At this time, the teacher entered the hallway and deemed the smoke too heavy to escape through the halls, and returned to her classroom to await rescue from the fire department. It was at this time that a janitor from the school noticed the fire, sent students to the second floor in the other two corridors to evacuate the building, sounded the manual alarm, and notified the rectory of the fire.
Since the fire alarm had no direct line to the fire department, a phone call was placed from the rectory to the fire department. For some reason, however, a 12-minute delay between the janitor’s arrival and the rectory’s phone call to the fire department took place. Firefighters were on scene mere moments after the incident was reported, however, and immediately began rescue efforts.
The north wing’s second floor was quickly becoming inescapable. Due to the first floor’s heavy fire-blocking wooden door, the now growing fire, which had gained fresh oxygen from a broken window on the lower level, shot straight up the stairwell into the second floor, quickly engulfing the hallways and heating the corridor enough to burst the glass above the classrooms, allowing smoke and fire to enter each room.
Over 325 students and five teachers were trapped on the second floor at this time.
Firefighters tried in vain to rescue those trapped in the upstairs classrooms as quickly as possible, but time was limited due to the intensity of the smoke and heat. Many of the schoolchildren were pushing their way to the windows, and many smaller children were trampled or pushed aside. Some students even jumped from the second story window, some 25 feet down, in an attempt to escape the blaze.
In all, despite the rescue of over 175 students, 92 students and 3 nuns were killed in the blaze, trapped on the second floor with no means of escape. One of the most memorable photographs in all of journalism in the 20th Century was that of firefighter Richard Scheidt carrying out the lifeless body of a student taken by Chicago American photographer Steve Lasker at the incident.
The fire played a major role in the fire safety features in most schools as we know it today, making many of the changes that were grandfathered into fire policies unacceptable and forcing the up-to-date systems and evacuation plans as we know them today.
Knoll, 19, of Eldora, can be contacted by email at bknolljr4cmcherald@yahoo.com. He is a student at Rowan University.