Fire in the Big House. Mitchel P. Roth
like a ceiling or a roof, they spread out laterally until they reach the wall. In this case the wind and the flames conspired to spread death, trapping many convicts in their cells, beyond human aid and fearing what was to come. Their voices joined in a mighty crescendo of screams.
One of the best-chronicled building fires in the history of the United States, the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston, offers insight into how victims often die in fires. The patrons were of course not locked in cells like the Ohio inmates, but they might as well have been. One account described nightclub victims who “seemed to be falling down without even trying to run or to push. They were suffocating. Some were falling victim to carbon monoxide in the thick smoke that was already replacing the oxygen in their bloodstream. Others were burning up inside as they inhaled the superheated air—burning wood and fabric that can generate temperatures … that seared shut their throat and lungs.”55
There were a number of other parallels between these two fires. Both were first reported at 5:20, and both moved with “astonishing speed.” Both were shortlived but resulted in high mortality. At Cocoanut Grove, firefighters not only had to battle flames quickly but had to cope with a frenzied dinner crowd running helter-skelter in the dense black smoke. Similarly to the Ohio Penitentiary event, where guards failed to take charge and use common sense, at the Grove a waiter asked one of the employees for keys to the locked service door, which he knew were kept in the kitchen, and was told, “Not until the boss tells me.”56
The almost twenty-minute gap between when the fire was first discovered and 5:39, when the Columbus Fire Department received its first alarm, meant the difference between rescue and mass death. It took about two minutes for one fire truck and three engine companies under the command of Assistant Fire Chief Osborn to reach the pen from the No. 1 firehouse on Front and Elm Streets. By the time they arrived the fire had already spread through two-thirds of the cell house containing the four blocks. Despite their best efforts, the strong northerly wind continued to push the fire and smoke into the occupied G&H block.57 By 5:45 the firefighters had brought their equipment into the prison. Two minutes later, the first photograph of the fire, taken at 5:47, “showed the north quarter of the roof of cell building already burned down and all the remainder of the roof visible in the picture gutted or in full flame.”58
Upon their arrival the firemen connected a hydrant at the northwest corner of the new auditorium (across the yard from the E&F dormitories and the closest building to I&K) and directed a stream of water into a notch window in the I&K cellblocks. Unfortunately, the heavy iron grilling on the windows caused the stream of water to become “so broken up as to be rendered ineffective,” and the line was soon cut off.59
By the time all pumpers were operational and connected to hydrants, “the fire was burning fiercely and the entire roof over I and K had fallen in.” Initially several convicts took the hose away from some firefighters they thought were not responding fast enough and attempted to carry it into the ranges themselves. They were quickly persuaded to let the firemen work unimpeded. Several more lines were hooked up to pumpers to extinguish the fires burning in bedding and cell furnishings in various cells.
It took the firefighters ten to fifteen minutes after arrival to ascend to the top range of cells, having first had to direct the laying of hose lines outside. Once there, they saw dead men in the cells.60 The firefighters would spend most of their time that evening inside the walls, since they also assisted in the removal of bodies. According to a spokesman for the department on the scene, they believed the fire started from the north end and traveled south with the stiff wind.
Ohio has a legacy of firefighting knowhow. The nation’s first paid fire department was inaugurated in 1853 in Cincinnati, just a hundred miles from Columbus. A year earlier, Boston had introduced a fire box system, making “telegraphy the servant of firefighting.” The precursor to the call box used to summon firefighters to the Columbus fire, it was described as “a system of metal alarm boxes that when ‘pulled’ would immediately transmit their location to a central office. From here the location of the box would be tapped out to all firehouses in the vicinity, so that the nearest one knew to respond first.61
Unlike their modern-day counterparts, alarm boxes in the 1930s were purposely made so they would be difficult to pull. Authorities were concerned that “light-minded people would play with the fire alarm equipment and cause needless runs.” In order to even open the box, an individual reporting a fire would have to retrieve the key, which was kept at a nearby house or business. Not surprisingly, this process often led to delayed alarms. Except for these devices there were surprisingly “few innovations in firefighting until the early twentieth century.”62
The assistant fire chief, who would go on to help direct the removal of the bodies after the catastrophe, remained firmly of the opinion that the fire started in the north end and traveled south with the wind. Moreover, he was convinced that the fire must have started no more than half an hour before the alarm sounded.
The Columbus firefighters discovered multiple secondary fires, including a “burning pile of rubbish, rags and paper” under the steps leading to the chapel and fires in the cotton mill building and the E&F dormitory.63 Fire officials testified later that these fires were of incendiary origin, not part of any prearranged prison escape but just convicts being convicts, taking advantage of the pandemonium to “add to the excitement and general confusion.”
The chapel fire was controlled quickly with only slight damage to the exterior. The cotton mill fire, the largest of the secondary fires, was located on the first floor of the north end of the building. The chief engineer at the power house luckily discovered the blaze and was able to break through the building’s door and spray the contents of a two-and-a-half-gallon chemical extinguisher. It would come out during the fire inquiry that extinguishers were only available in the factory buildings. (Since extinguishers were frequently targeted by incendiaries and there had never been a fire of any magnitude in the cellblocks, this was considered an appropriate strategy under the Thomas administration.) With the assistance of a hose line manned by firemen, this fire too was extinguished. Except for some water damage, the cotton mill building was little damaged.64 The third of the incendiary fires was found in the bunkhouse housing black prisoners. It turned out that several beds had been torched, and when a fireman stepped in to put it out he was threatened by the occupants. He was soon joined by other firemen supported by prison guards, and this fire was extinguished as well.
One firefighter would later lament that “the prisoners expected us to do the impossible. Our line wouldn’t reach to the second floor. We had hell. The prisoners took the line away from us…. If they had any leadership we would have been completely mobbed.” They implied that the prisoners wanted them do something “we couldn’t do.” By some accounts there were an estimated 140 firemen on the scene at the height of the fire, working twenty-three lines, so as to direct twenty-three different streams on all sides of the burning cell house, and eight pumpers, each with a one-thousand-gallon capacity. However, an initial fire report suggested that the number of firefighters was actually higher, as it was “considerably” supplemented by members of the off shift.65
When the hoses didn’t work, firemen resorted to acetylene torches to open cells. Unfortunately, their hoses did not reach the sixth tier, and they were soon surrounded by frantic convicts trying to wrest them away. One firefighter commented, “I don’t think they were trying to be malicious—just crazy with the horror of seeing their fellows die like rats” on the upper tiers. But other cons did make deliberate attempts to stop them from doing their jobs, such as the madman who cut a hose line before being seen running away gripping a knife.
Prisoners and firemen were both adversaries and collaborators. At one point