Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
Trapped behind locked doors, stuck on a collapsing fire escape, and forced to jump from the top floors, 123 women and 23 men met their deaths in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire within a half hour.¹
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire was a tragic loss of human life. Nevertheless, the glaring public display uncovered many formerly invisible social injustices, inspiring the workplace safety standards that we experience today.
Three months prior to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the New York City Fire Commission determined that building was a “fire trap."² Among other hazards, oil-soaked waste materials littered the floor, the exits were unmarked, and the fire hose was defective. However, the owners—Isaac Harris and Max Blanck—circumvented enough safety standards that the building remained hazardous despite the concerns.
Harris and Blanck were required to equip the building with three full-length staircases. The owners met the three-staircase minimum, but only one staircase was full-length. The second staircase led only to the tenth floor, and the third staircase was actually just a fire escape.¹
Furthermore, Harris and Blanck met the factory air space standard (a minimum of 250 cubic feet of air per person), but much of the air was accounted for in the high loft ceilings rather than in the actual floor space workers occupied;² the ventilation and floor space were dangerously restricted.
The small amount of floor space was further limited by long tables and large machinery that impeded possible routes to the exits. The exit doors also caused concern. The fire escape door opened outward onto the escape, blocking the path of anyone caught behind the opened door. All other factory doors opened inward, hindering large groups of workers from reaching the staircases quickly.
The inward-opening hinges hardly mattered to the 9th floor employees in light of the fact that the 9th floor door was often (allegedly) locked in order to prevent theft.²
These hazards contributed not only to the fire’s outbreak but also to its destructive and unstoppable spread. The oil-soaked fabric scraps allegedly brought the flames to life; the tables and machinery prevented workers from making a quick escape; the outward-opening fire escape door blocked workers from the stairs; the locked 9th floor door trapped workers in the building; and the defective fire hose rendered any attempts to extinguish the flames useless.
By the time the fire dissipated, 146 workers had suffered horrifying deaths:²
62 jumped to their deaths from the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors
30 died in the broken-down elevator
approximately 12 fell with the collapsed fire escape
40-50 were piled up dead against the locked 9th floor door
Though horrifying enough, the death toll was only the public side of the factory workers' suffering. Their tribulations started long before the flames.
1. Tony R. Sanchez, “The Triangle Fire: A Simulation-Based Lesson,” The Social Studies 97, no. 2 (2006): 62-8
2. Arthur F. McEvoy, “The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911: Social Change, Industrial Accidents, and the Evolution of Common-Sense Causality,” Law & Social Inquiry 20, no. 2 (1995): 621-51.
