Glare in the Sky

The echoing quiet of midnight had settled in the lighted corridors and the dim rooms and wards of St. Anthony's Hospital at Effingham, Ill. Outside, the town (pop. 8,000) and its surrounding farms slept. An operator-nun sat at the hospital switchboard, waiting for emergency calls. Out in the hall the elevator door banged open; a nun hurried from it to report that smoke was drifting in the hospital's upstairs corridors.

Almost as soon as the operator gave the alarm, the old building was full of heat and choking fumes. Flames crackled in stairwells and hallways even before the 20 newborn babies in the nursery awakened and began to cry, before St. Anthony's 30 aged men & women pensioners, its 72 other patients (some in splints and traction devices) began to struggle and call for help.

Flaming Silhouettes. Neighbors awakened by screams and the tinkling crash of breaking windows, ran out to stare into a nightmare. St. Anthony's a plain, white-trimmed brick building, had stood in Effingham for 73 years; it was the only hospital in the county and its white-garbed Franciscan nuns had tended generations of the aged and the injured, the newborn and the dying. Now flame flickered and glared from behind almost every window and silhouetted frantic figures--nuns, nurses, patients in hospital gowns.

Minutes passed before the Effingham volunteer fire department, awakened by the station-house siren, got from their beds to the firehouse; by the time the first engine had ended a screaming 70-mile-an-hour run, desperate patients were leaping out windows. Yelling firemen hurriedly began raising ladders. So did nearby householders. Other men & women dragged mattresses from their houses, tried to use them to break the fall of those who were poised to leap with the flames licking at them.

As the rescue work went on, the firemen made an alarming discovery--water pressure in the nearest hydrant was uselessly low; 15 precious minutes were lost running lines to outlets blocks away. Frantically, many a man fought his way into the building after relatives. Some succeeded, but most were driven back by heat and the smell of burning flesh. Building Superintendent Frank Ries went in to hunt for his wife and never came out again. Prospective Father Arnold Aderman watched his wife come down a ladder, got her home just in time to have her baby.

Ruins at Dawn. The work of claiming the living soon ended. Despite the plumes of white water which finally rose to the smoking walls, the fire roared with almost explosive fury. The roof and all the floors crashed in. Debris rumbled down. At dawn, as the pumps labored, St. Anthony's was a smoking ruin.

After that, hour after hour, day after day, men hunted in the wreckage for bodies. Effingham's business all but ceased. At the morgue, men & women moved with a stunned matter-of-factness--one woman, looking for her baby, stared at a small, charred body and said, "No, he was smaller" in the same tone she might have used if she were shopping. The funerals went on for days.

Of 128 men, women & children who had been in the hospital when the fire broke out, 74 were dead.

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