Nearly 145 young
women died horribly on March 25, 1911, in an 8th floor fire that
destroyed the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in New York City. Most of them died
jumping down an elevator shaft or to the street below.
 |
| The fire escape |
The grisly details
are pretty well known. Not the least of them is that one of the two possible
escape route stairwells was locked “to prevent employee theft”
and that the exterior fire escape was cheaply built and couldn’t support the
weight of more than a few women at a time. The owners had refused to install
sprinklers.
History.com notes that New York City firemen had ladder trucks that only reached to the 7th
floor, and their safety nets “were not strong enough to catch the women, who
were jumping three at a time.”
Policemen and
other witnesses reported the macabre staccato of bodies repeatedly thudding
onto the sidewalk in downtown Manhattan.
Max Blanck and
Isaac Harris owned the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. In the nine years preceding the
1911 fire, sweatshop operations owned by Blanck and Harris burned four times,
and each time the two men collected on substantial fire insurance policies.
More than a
century later, a disgusting element of the tragedy is that the company’s
culpable owners were charged with manslaughter and tried, but they walked away
without any penalty.
Anything sounding
familiar here?
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
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