Word: fire
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...second floor, the teacher thought that the room was getting too warm. Said she: 'Why don't some of you boys open the windows?" In fourth-grade arithmetic, a boy blurted: "Sister, I smell smoke." Smoke began to seep under classroom doors, through open transoms. A fire alarm clanged. The fourth-grade teacher opened the door, found the corridor full of smoke, slammed the door shut. She told the children to go to the windows and pray...
...school, saw smoke coming out of the back door. Before he could get out of the car, flames were shooting out of the school. At 2:42 he gave the first alarm. At 2:44 the first company of firemen got there, sirens screaming. The situation: a flash fire had started in the rear-basement stair well of the school's north wing, had been shut out of the first floor by fire-prevention doors, was now engulfing the second floor -fire doors open-with five classrooms, upwards of 200 children...
...second floor the fire blowtorched down the 35-yd. corridor behind clouds of thick, black smoke, blocked all ways to the only fire escape at the rear. Out of the last of the five classrooms a nun in her 305 crawled with 40 seventh-graders to a front staircase, desperately rolled the children down the stairs to safety before coming down herself. But in the four other classrooms the children were trapped...
...Where's the Daughter At?" By 4 o'clock the fireman, with feats of businesslike heroism, got control of the fire, fought on to the smoke-foul second floor, began carrying out bodies. Police lines held back parents and relatives, some standing frozen and numb, some crying hysterically. As dark fell, the watchers moved on to St. Anne's Hospital 16 blocks from the school, waited for word of dead and injured. Doctors rushed children into surgery. Nurses parted crowds to wheel beds carrying children and plasma poles. Priests moved slowly from group to group, lips moving...
...Come On Out, Son." Next day Chicago dazedly, sadly, tried to find out what had gone wrong. Known point was that the second-floor fire doors had been left open, making a flue for the flames. Not known was how the fire had started at the foot of the stair well itself. A cigarette tossed into wastepaper in the basement? Spontaneous combustion...