ECONOMICHISTORY Conflagration in Baltimore by KARL RHODES
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ECONOMICHISTORY Conflagration in Baltimore BY KARL RHODES n a cold Sunday morning in 1,500 buildings on 86 city blocks in The 1904 disaster February 1904, a small ember the heart of what was then America’s was a turning Oor spark ignited packing cases sixth-largest city. Miraculously, the fire in the basement of the “fire-proof” killed only four or five people, but point for U.S. fire Hurst building in downtown Baltimore. it left 35,000 people jobless. Damage Firefighters arrived quickly and broke estimates reached as high as $100 million prevention down a door, creating a backdraft that — more than $2.6 billion in today’s whisked superheated air up the build- dollars. ing’s unprotected elevator shaft and In the 19th century and early 20th central staircase. The firemen heard century, conflagration was a constant doors slamming shut on the upper floors threat to American cities, primarily of the six-story headquarters of John E. because they had been built more quickly Hurst and Company. Then they heard and cheaply than their European coun- an “ominous rumbling.” terparts. American fires consumed large The firemen retreated to the street amounts of capital each year. One esti- minutes before an ear-splitting explo- mate in 1910 put the average annual “fire sion blew the roof off the building, show- waste” at $500 per minute in the United ering adjacent structures with flaming States, which would be about $12,340 per debris. As more firefighters rushed to minute in today’s dollars. the scene, a hook-and-ladder wagon “How absurd it is that we have fires zoomed past a nearby church, catching to-day!” wrote Maynard Metcalf in the the attention of Reverend D’Aubigny, July 1916 issue of Scientific Monthly. a visitor from France. He was anxious Metcalf, a zoologist at Johns Hopkins to witness an American conflagration. University, highlighted Reverend “That is something I must see,” the D’Aubigny’s fascination with American reverend said. “We do not have them conflagrations to demonstrate that U.S. Moments after the in Paris.” cities were much more vulnerable to ear-splitting explosion, the D’Aubigny, no doubt, was shocked massive fires than European cities. “The “fire-proof ” Hurst building by what he saw. The fire raged for economic system of fire insurance under was engulfed in flames. 30-plus hours, destroying more than private management, so greatly devel- oped, has removed the individual motive for fire prevention,” Metcalf charged. “It is simpler for the individual to gain security against loss by fire by hiring an insurance company to carry his risks than it is for him to prevent loss from fire by building fireproof buildings.” Insurance rates typically did not reward fire-resistant construction in 1904, agrees Marc Schneiberg, an orga- nizational and economic sociologist at Reed College. “So it was not clear who would reap the benefits.” Reformers within the industry had been advocating risk-adjusted rate schedules for years, but many insurance executives failed to see how their companies would ben- efit from prevention. “As long as they could keep the premium rates and the loss rates in the right proportion, they PHOTOGRAPHY: J.H. SCHAEFER AND SON (ENOCH PRATT FREE LIBRARY) 30 E CON F OCUS | F OURTH Q UARTER | 2015 really didn’t care if they had high average losses because they of Georgia and author of Seven Fires: The Urban Infernos that would just raise rates,” Schneiberg says. Reshaped America. Instead of stopping the fire, the explo- This attitude infuriated critics who contended that insur- sions blew out windows of adjacent buildings, making them ance companies made cities more hazardous by not differ- more vulnerable to the flames and intense heat, which entiating between safe and unsafe properties, according reached 2,500 degrees in some hot spots. to Sara Wermiel, a research affiliate of MIT’s Program in After 10 p.m., the wind shifted and intensified, with gusts Science, Technology, and Society and author of The Fireproof exceeding 30 miles per hour. “Had this wind brought with Building: Technology and Public Safety in the Nineteenth-Century it rain or snow, the fire might have quieted, but the angry American City. current only drove the fire southeast, toward the harbor But after the Baltimore fire, insurance leaders began to and the pier warehouses loaded with new sources of fuel,” realize that their ability to continually raise rates to pay for Hoffer wrote. conflagrations was declining because of increasing political On Monday, the wind blew the fire south toward the and competitive pressures. And when the devastating San harbor and east toward Jones Falls, a canal that was about 75 Francisco earthquake and fire occurred in 1906, the confla- feet wide. There were large residential sections east of the gration hazard appeared to be getting much worse. falls, so the firemen resolved to stop the conflagration there These events “forcibly brought home to insurance engi- in what Hoffer called “one of the most remarkable stands in neers that the increasing congestion of values in the larger the history of American firefighting.” Hoffer’s personified cities represented a menace both to the public and to the fire “leaped at targets of opportunity in the lumberyards, business of fire underwriting,” wrote H.A. Smith, president malt houses, and dwellings on the east side of the falls. of the National Fire Insurance Company of Hartford, in the Had it established a beachhead on the east side, all of east Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Baltimore would have shared the fate of downtown.” But the in 1927. “Although the business profited because fire is an engine companies held their ground, and by 5 p.m., the fire ever-present possibility in all walks of life, the incineration had essentially run out of fuel. of material wealth was reaching proportions which threat- In the days that followed, engineers, architects, and build- ened economic disaster.” ers converged on Baltimore to study the ruins — especially the remnants of the city’s so-called “fire-proof” buildings. Baltimore Ablaze Wermiel credited “a wall of substantial public buildings” for After the Hurst building exploded, Baltimore’s fire chief helping to turn the fire south toward the harbor. Metcalf sent an urgent telegram to his counterpart in Washington, also praised the well-protected O’Neil building, which sus- D.C: “Big fire here. Must have help at once.” tained almost no damage, for helping to turn the fire east Firemen from Washington scrambled onto railroad toward the falls. The contents of the city’s other “fire-proof” flatcars for a full-throttle, open-air ride to Baltimore in buildings burned “like charcoal in a furnace,” Hoffer wrote, sub-freezing weather. Cheering crowds welcomed them but their superstructures remained intact. While some to Camden Station, but by then, the fire was spreading to critics ridiculed these charred skeletons, the visiting archi- the northeast beyond the seven-block area bounded by the tects and engineers concluded that Baltimore’s “fire-proof” streets of Liberty, Lombard, Baltimore, and Hopkins Place. buildings performed well considering the intense heat that To make matters worse, the D.C. firefighters discovered surrounded them during the inferno. “In other words, that the couplings on their hoses did not fit Baltimore’s fire-resistive buildings could help avert conflagration, but hydrants. They devised makeshift adapters, but the water not if they stood as islands in a sea of firetraps,” Wermiel pressure in their hoses was severely limited. Firemen arriv- concluded. ing in Baltimore from other cities also encountered similar In the months following the Baltimore fire, campaigns compatibility problems. for fire-resistant construction and other preventive mea- Initially, Baltimore turned down offers of assistance sures gained momentum. For example, the National Fire from other cities, but the fire continued to burn out of Underwriters Board (NFUB) established national building control, and at 6 p.m. the mayor sent a desperate dispatch code guidelines in 1905. These guidelines had been in the to Philadelphia: “Send all help possible.” Philadelphia works for a long time, but the Baltimore and San Francisco responded quickly, as did New York, Wilmington, Del., fires made cities and states more willing to adopt them, says and 20 smaller mid-Atlantic cities. Dozens of engine com- Dalit Baranoff, an expert in the history of fire insurance panies — assisted by more than 2,000 Maryland National and a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Guardsmen — tried in vain to contain the fire throughout Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business the night. At one point, demolition crews attempted to Enterprise. create fire breaks by blowing up buildings in the fire’s The NFUB also commissioned a committee of fire path. One pre-emptive explosion at the Armstrong Shoe experts to assess risks in “conflagration districts” around the factory sent “shoes and boots flying into the night sky,” but country. Many cities made important safety improvements the blasts failed to bring down the buildings, according to as a result of the committee’s inspections — not just to be Peter Charles Hoffer, a history professor at the University safer, but to bring down their insurance rates. E CON F OCUS | F OURTH Q UARTER | 2015 31 The Conflagration Hazard rates,” Baranoff says. The companies also experienced many As American cities grew “from settlement size to metrop- of the classic obstacles to collusion — “free riding, defection, olis size, the size of the largest fires grew in proportion,” and prisoner’s dilemmas,” Schneiberg wrote, in a 1999 article wrote nuclear-safety consultant William Shields in his in Politics & Society.