Great Chicago Fire
I have no passion or desire to write about a thunderous destruction of a city or the death of hundreds of people. Yes, I have no connection to this topic, besides my home being 30 minutes from downtown Chicago, but that does not mean that this fire does not pertain to me or anyone who lives in a completely different state for that matter. So, just because I have never experienced a disaster of this magnitude does not mean that my lips should stay shut regarding the topic of the Great Chicago Fire. What must be done is to look at events and, for that matter, life in a certain perspective that is not always one-sided. This one-sidedness can come from focusing on a particular outcome without realizing what else can come from that desired outcome.
The Great Chicago Fire occurred during October 8th and 9th of 1871. The weeks leading up to this disaster were spent with an extremely watchful eye on the city due to the lack of rain. So, one spark or one small fire could start an extremely large fire because of how much wood had been used to build the city. There were even warnings given in form of a building inspection department idea that would inform the city that the buildings were “shoddily constructed firetraps”, according to the Tribune at the time. However, the city did nothing about the proposed problem of a dangerous fire breakout and paid the price.
It came to the evening of October 8th, 1871 and the table had been set. It is still unclear how the fire had started because one newspaper claimed that a cow kicked over a lantern to start a barn on fire. However, that newspaper retracted their claims when charges of slander surfaced. The fact of the matter is, it started on t...
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...ou are not heading down the life path that you had wanted since you were young. You would have a chance to go ahead and change your life and your happiness simply because you got canned. Obviously, if you did not get fired you would not have had that chance to sit back and realize your life is sliding away in the wrong direction. Indeed, that is a very extreme example of how this question would apply to everyday life, but it works with those events of the simplest nature too.
If one looks at disasters in this way, it is much easy for it to be rationalized. How do people who do not believe in a God and its plan for everyone deal with the fact that so many people perished from one act. There is no good reason for mass amounts of people to die, but if something greater comes from it regarding the well-being of many more people it makes it more bearable.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire not only affected the city of New York, but also the rest of the country. It forever changed the way our country would look at safety regulations in factories and buildings. The fire proved to America what can and will happen if we over-look safety regulations and over-crowd buildings. Unfortunately, 146 lives are taken before we fully understand this concept.
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America is about Teddy Roosevelt’s attempt to save the beautiful scenery of the West. Roosevelt used his presidency as a springboard to campaign for his want of protection for our woodlands, while doing this he created the Forest Service from this battle. In this book, Timothy Egan explores the Northern Rockies to analyze the worst wildfire in United States history. This disaster is known as the “Big Burn,” the 1910 fire that quickly engulfed three million acres of land in Idaho, Montana and Washington, completely burned frontier towns and left a smoke cloud so thick that it hovered over multiple cities even after the flames had been extinguished. Egan begins this story about the Big Burn of 1910 with the story of how the United States Forest Service came into existence.
Several fires spanned the county and created the devastation. The first fire dubbed the Harris Ranch Fire started 9:23 am October 21, 2007 in the South Eastern portion of the county. Was determined to have been started by an illegal campfire, and moved North West fanned by the winds. The fires continued to start in differing areas of the county over a 72 hour period, some sparked by downed power-lines, and suspicious circumst...
Little rain caused excessively the dry conditions, creating a giant tinderbox. On the afternoon of June 6, 1889, a young Swede from New York named John Back, an assistant in Victor Clairmont`s woodworking shop at Front Street (now First Avenue) and Madison Avenue, was heating glue over a gasoline fire. The glue boiled over, caught fire, and spread to the floors, which were covered by wood chips and turpentine. He tried to put the fire out with water, but that only served to thin the turpentine and spread the fire further. The pyre quickly engulfed two saloons and a liquor store, fueled by large quantities of alcohol, the entire block from Madison to Marion was ablaze. Due to an inadequate water supply, insufficient equipment, and with hydrants located only on every other block, the fire ravaged Seattle. Fire jumped the firebreak, and began to devour the wharves as well as everything up the hill toward Second Avenue. In less than two hours it was realized that downtown Seattle was lost. Miraculously, no one had died in the
The City of Detroit, Michigan, seems to be a city on the decline in America. Job prospects some of the lowest in the country and one of the only cities to be shrinking, rather than growing. There are a lot of problems Detroit is facing, one of them is there incidence rate for fires. Detroit is the number one city in America for house fires, not to mention their high rate of fires in the many vacant buildings throughout the city. There are many socioeconomic factors with the city that make the incident rates rise, and response less effective.
Mrs. Rayfield wrote a great article about the devastation left over after this massive fire. I found that her accounts were very detailed and had good pictures to go along with them. I decided to use this source in my essay because she also showed the good effect that the fire had on the city not only the bad. She had a complete different point of view.
fires in the first week of October, on Saturday night, October 7, a blaze broke
However, when you look at the times that these events occurred and transcribed, these were times of a lack of scientific understanding. The people didn’t have the tools or capability to understand how volcanoes or plagues worked, so in order to come up with a satisfying answer, they turned to God. Meaning that disastrous natural events, were not understood as natural, and the people of the time attempted to come up with reasons as to why the occurred, and that a God being angry and causing pain on them would be a satisfying reason. As Anderson pointed out there are no geological evidence of great floods, and many events that could have occurred such as plagues, most likely would have occurred without the existence of God, yet God made a great scapegoat. If an event happened that caused suffering then God was clearly angry, and if brought generous periods then God was happy with what people were doing. For example, the 10 plagues of Egypt were caused by God for the Pharaoh refusing his will, yet there are many scientific explanations as to why these could have occurred or similar events. Unfortunately, we cannot know the full truth since the stories are the only accounts we have. Since we have no other accounts, it makes sense as to why people would start to question the stories
Faulkner, William. Barn Burning. First Vintage International ed. N.p.: Random House, 1950. Print. The Country.
Before the fire broke out on Sunday night, October 8, 1871 there had been a large drought causing everything to be dry and extremely flammable. Many fires had been breaking out in Chicago. Records show that in 1870 the fire fighters went to nearly 600 fires. On Saturday night there had been a large fire that destroyed about four blocks and lasted for 16 hours. Another reason why everything in Chicago was so flammable was because almost the entire city was made out of wood. It was a lot worse in the middle class and poor sections of the town (19). Just about every house was made out of wood. Even buildings that claimed to be fire proof had wood roofs covered with tar. The richer part of town had stone and brick homes, but wooden interiors, wooden stables, and wooden storage buildings (Cromie, 81). Chicago was built on marshland and every time it rained the city flooded, so to help this problem the roads were made out of wood and elevated above the waterline. The day the fire started there were over 55 miles of pine-block street and 600 miles of wooden sidewalks. “Chicago in 1871 was a city ready to burn,” according to Jim Murphy, author of The Great Fire (Murphy, 18).
The Great Fire of London, as documented by Samuel Pepys and other writers, began on the early morning of Sunday, September 2nd 1666 when a fire erupted at Pudding Lane in Thomas Farriner’s bakery (Dailey and Tomedi 43). Farriner, who was the king’s baker, went to fetch a candle some time close to midnight. While going to get the candle, Farriner observed that his oven was not lit and that there were no embers. However, two hours later Farriner and his family awoke feeling “almost choked with smoked” (Shields 80). Farriner quickly dashed over to the top of the stairs and found flames making their way up from the shop below. According to Farriner, the fire was not in the proximity of his over nor the pile of wood close to his house (Shields 81). However this and the actual cause of the fire in the house are debatable due to Farriner possibly attempting to remove any blame placed on him from the fire by lying in his testimony of the in...
“‘Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?’ ‘No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it.’ ‘Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames.’”(6)
They had to wake Paul Bunyan up so he could stamp out the fire with his boots. Another short story is told by S. E. Schlosser. One spring day, the loggers on the Wisconsin River discovered a huge log jam, the biggest they'd ever seen. The logs were piled about two hundred feet high and the jam went upriver for a mile or more. Those
Sunday September 2, 1666 at 2 a.m. was the day when the fire began (Cowie, 59). It had all began in a baker’s house due to a spark that was “left” in one of his ovens. ‘”, all that was needed was a spark. This was provided at the house of Thomas Farynor, the King’s baker in Pudding Lane…”’ (“London’s Burning: The Great Fire”, 1). In this area was known as a poor area and it was also very dirty. All the houses were made out of wood, which fed the fire and it started to spread. The baker’s house was the first house to burn down and that is also where the first tragedy took place. The wind was strong during this time and as it blew it would push the fire and help it spread through the city. The people started waking up due to the smell of the smoke and they tried to put the fire out as fast as they could. The fire fighters even tired to stop the fire but it was to big for one truck to handle. One of the residents ran to the Mayors house to warm him of what was happening. When told of what was happening, “…the L...
...r it is arson, an uncontrolled camp fire, or a cigarette butt it doesn’t take much for humans to spark a disaster. Yet there is as well a few set by good old Mother Nature. On top of the effects on the earth as well as humans, there is only one thing we all can do and that is listen to our old pal Smokey the Bear when he says, “only you can prevent wildfire.”