| It was a pleasant evening on
that spring day in 1875, when between 600 and 700 parishioners
gathered together for a vespers service to celebrate Corpus
Christi, a religious feast day that commemorated the beginning
of the Holy Eucharist.
Just six years before, the growing congregation in South Holyoke,
Massachusetts, had constructed a temporary wooden church building
out of pine. It had taken them only one month to construct it,
beginning in December of 1869, and finishing in January of 1870.
The wooden structure would hold up to 400 worshippers on its
ground floor, and another 400 in its eastern and western galleries.
At the front of the church were three doors. The main doors
in the center were six feet wide, and the other two doors, located
on the sides of the building near the front were forty-four
inches wide.
To sit in the gallery, parishioners would find only one way
up, through the east entrance, where a four foot wide stairway
wound up to the gallery.
The congregation was growing, and when they grew to between
2,000 and 2,500 in 1875, the church began construction of a
new building just beside the original wooden church.
On that fateful night of May 27, 1875, the twenty-minute long
service was about to conclude. In those days there was no air
conditioning, and with so many people in the building, it no
doubt would have been hot and stuffy after just a few minutes.
Someone had opened the windows to allow a soft breeze into the
room.
During the service, a candle had been burning near one of the
windows. When a gust of wind blew the lace curtain into the
room and over the burning candle, the curtain immediately burst
into flames. The flames quickly made its way up the curtain,
setting the structure on fire. Since there was no sprinkling
system, the fire spread at an explosive rate.
The pastor begged the parishioners to remain calm, but it was
no use. Perhaps people in those days knew how quickly a wooden
structure would burn, because there was panic as people rushed
toward the front entrance to make their escape. The front doors
quickly become clogged and impassable.
Those who were in the galleries above were in even more trouble.
As people made their way down the stairs, some of them fell,
making it even more difficult to escape. Within minutes, there
were some who were already on fire trying to make it to the
stairway. Some of them were able to jump out of the windows
onto scaffolding on the side it had been erected for the construction
of the new church. But on the other side of the building, the
height was too great to jump without serious injury or death.
The local fire department responded very quickly, and began
pulling people from the entrances and the stairway, some of
whom were already dead.
The firement were unable to save the building. It was completely
destroyed in only twenty minutes.
As the fire fighters began laying out the bodies of the dead
and injured, the full scope of the tragedy began to unfold.
Fifty-five women and nineteen men had perished in the fire.
Not long afterwards, someone wrote these words in an article
titled “Necessary Precautions against being
Killed in Church” in a magazine called “The Manufacturer and
Builder”:
“At last the Department of Buildings in this city has done what
all the large European cities have been doing for more than
a hundred years, namely, taken measures to secure that the means
of egress of all buildings in which a large number of persons
congregate, shall be so spacious that there can be no danger
of a choking up of the paths of egress in case of a panic, while
the large doors must always open toward the outside, and have
simple inside fastenings, so that no keys are required to open
them if they are shut”…
Besides the requirements for sprinkling buildings, one of the
most fundamental portions of our modern day building codes reflects
this very statement. Wherever there is a large crowd there must
be a sufficient number of doors that are wide enough to allow
people to escape. If those doorways have any type of latch,
then “panic” bars are installed on the doors so that when a
crowd presses against the door, the door will automatically
open. Exits that have been properly sized and placed, and that
have been equipped with these devices has undoubtedly saved
many lives.
Had these codes existed and been used at Precious Blood, there
probably would have been no injuries and no deaths.
|
