Fire

It was 7 p. m. in the narrow streets of the mill city of Fall River, Mass. Frazzled textile workers were trudging into cinema theatres. Clerks were taking off their shoes, preparatory to reading the newspapers, while their wives washed the supper dishes. Unnoticed, a fire broke out in the abandoned mill of the Pocasset Manufacturing Co. on the edge of the business and theatrical district.

It spread rapidly, fanned by bitter winds. A general alarm was sounded. Out of the theatres stumbled blinking creatures whose sham emotions were slowly growing real. Clerks put on their shoes and hurried through the streets to office buildings, to rescue documents and typewriters. Traffic became a honking confusion of motorists from surrounding towns, attracted by a hellish red in the sky, visible for 20 miles. A group of enterprising young men started removing papers from the City Hall. Police stopped them. Salvation Army workers served coffee and sandwiches to the firemen. The Elks held open house. All through the night firemen pushed back the crowds, fought the flames. They used a fourth of all the water in Fall River's great reservoirs. . . .

Next morning, black, jagged walls, crumbled ruins, ice-covered fire trucks greeted sleepy eyes. But the Fall River Globe, which had been printed in nearby Taunton, also appeared. "CITY STUNNED" said black headlines. The editorial began: "Fall River Faces Front."

Five city blocks had been completely wiped out. Four banks, three theatres, three hotels, two newspaper plants, twelve office buildings, a Jewish Temple and a half dozen lunch rooms were hotbeds of rubbish. Total damage was estimated at $20,000,000. " Strangely enough, no one was killed; only a few suffered serious injuries. But 3,000 people were thrown out of work in a city of 150,000 population where wages had already been cut to the danger point (see p. 35). Fall River started building itself up again: There was prospect of more work. The whistles of 29 locomotives were screaming one afternoon last week. Their cords had been caught in the fallen timbers of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Co.'s roundhouse and shops of Connellsville, Pa., while fire ate up $4,000,000 worth of locomotives and property.

The National Board of Fire Underwriters took a year and a month to compute 1926 fire losses of $561,980,751 for the U. S., the greatest fire damage ever suffered by any country in any year. Small comfort was drawn from the results of Fire Prevention Week of October, 1926, when 400 fire chiefs of leading cities reported losses of only $400,848 as compared with a weekly normal for their territory of more than $1,200,000. The underwriters said that people can be careful to avoid fires if stirred to do it, but they are simply not careful when left to their own routine of negligence.