Download The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: The History and Legacy of New York City's Deadliest Industrial Disaster AudioBook Free
"Word had pass on through the East Part, by some magic of terror, that the place of the Triangle Waist Company was on fire which several hundred personnel were trapped. Horrified and helpless, the crowds - I included in this - appeared up at the burning up building, saw gal after girl seem at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment in time, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as mangled, bloody pulp. This continued for what seemed a ghastly eternity. Occasionally a woman who acquired hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and locks ablaze, plunged such as a living torch to the street. Life nets kept by the firemen were torn by the impact of the slipping bodies. The emotions of the group were indescribable. Women were hysterical, results fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines." (Louis Waldman, a New York Condition Assemblyman) Through the evening of March 25, 1911, soon before personnel at the Triangle Shirtwaist Manufacturing plant in the Asch Building remaining for the day, a hearth broke out in a scrap bin on the 8th floor of the building. Fires were nothing at all new in such situations, and the industrial journal The Insurance Monitor mentioned that garment factories were, "[F]airly saturated with moral risk." On this particular day, the pass on of the hearth to the primary staircase managed to get impossible for personnel still caught on the ninth and 10th floor surfaces to flee. Furthermore, without today's labor polices in place, a sophisticated alert of the hearth never even managed to get to the ninth floor, regardless of the fire starting just one single floor below, and the door to the only other stairway have been locked.
