On July 10, 1893 a fire in a cold storage warehouse in Chicago claimed the lives of
at least 16 men including at least 15 firefighters and injured over 20 others. The
warehouse was on the edge of the Columbian Exposition fairground and had been
intended to have the dual purpose of providing provisions to the restaurants and
cafes in the fairground while also demonstrating the new technology of refrigerated
warehousing.
I researched the root causes of this disaster about 10 years ago and I found that while the origins of the blaze were undoubtedly very 19th century there were some strong safety messages for the 21st century that sadly often go unheeded. The plant comprised several steamdriven ammonia compressors connected to a variety of
ice-making plants and refrigerated chambers. Steam was provided by coal-fired boilers in a room adjacent to the ammonia plant.
The refrigeration plant was somewhat undersized having been reduced from the original scheme but the load on the building had been increased by the late addition
of an ice skating rink on the top floor. My interest in the tragedy was sparked when I discovered an old issue of Scientific American that contained an eyewitness account of the fire written by a correspondent who had been on-site to report on the commissioning of the rink. The fatal fire broke out the first day that the skating plant had been put into service.
My investigation showed that several factors had contributed to the fire. The top of the chimney stack had not been installed according to the approved drawings, with a metal cupola omitted on cost-saving grounds and replaced with a wooden façade. The building was constructed from panels of “staff”—a highly combustible mix of plaster of paris and hemp fiber—fixed to wooden boards with wide air gaps between them. This construction enabled fire to spread rapidly within the walls and through air circulation ducts running the length of the building. The reduced boiler capacity, also
on cost-saving grounds, meant that the steam-raising plant was overloaded when the ice rink came on-line. This overload was probably the root cause of the initial ignition.
So many missed opportunities
In addition the emergency response resources on site were inadequate; there were no ladders on site long enough to reach the top of the tower and the water pumps could not generate enough pressure to jet water up there anyway. The emergency escape from the main tower was inadequate so the death toll was high because the firefighters were trapped at the top of a burning column. The system had never been fully commissioned so its performance under full load was untested. However,despite the inadequate resources the first responders were overconfident and rushed to deal with the visible problem without doing a thorough assessment of the situation. They treated a small fire at the top of the stack when a much larger one was burning inside the building at the foot. Despite the construction design and materials, the building had been described as “strictly fireproof.”
Lessons for the 21st century include the implications of cost cutting on safety. Equipment was undersized and overloaded, safety equipment was inadequate or nonexistent and safe means of escape did not exist. Previous minor incidents had been ignored and opportunities to improve site safety were wasted. It is essential for a healthy safety culture to treat “near misses” as seriously as incidents and use them as insights into sources of hazard. My study also showed me how important it is to do thorough accident investigation in order to learn lessons for other sites. This is difficult because people say what they think happened but may miss critical details. It is as important to ask what they felt, heard and smelled and also to pay attention to what they did not experience. None of the eyewitnesses to the Chicago fire mentioned the smell of ammonia at any time during the afternoon and none of the experts who addressed the inquest mentioned the commissioning of the ice rink as a relevant factor.
Bibliography
Pearson, A. 2009. “Lessons learned from the cold storage fire at the
Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.” ASHRAE Transactions 115(1):111–121
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