Word: firemen
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...apparatus arrived. No arrest was made. The Mayor was merely testing a new device calculated to make life more difficult for false alarmists, who, in New York City alone, call for firemen 8,000 times a year, at $300 a call. When Mayor Walker turned the handle a siren screeched at passersby, a camera on the pole over-head snapped his picture several times for the Rogues Gallery. Photographers pleaded with him to do it again...
Last week Chicago officials admitted that the city faced bankruptcy, that it had borrowed up to the legal limit on anticipated revenue, that only a Businessman's Commission could prevent financial disaster. Taxes were far behind because of assessments rank with favoritism. Fifty thousand city employes, chiefly firemen and policemen, were threatened with a prolonged suspension of pay. The extravagance of the Thompson administration was directly blamed. The Businessman's Commission, said the Chicago Tribune, was "a confession of moral and intellectual bankruptcy which is far more serious than fiscal bankruptcy...
Meanwhile nurses and others, many partly clothed, fled from the two main exits of the building, screaming and clutching their throats. Firemen and policemen rushed to the scene. For 15 minutes they could not penetrate the fumes without gas masks...
Fire ladders were extended to the roof. The firemen looked down through the broken skylight on a stairway filled with a mass of struggling bodies, arms and legs twisted and intertangled. Screams and shrieks of agony arose. The rescuers broke their way in from the roof. More than 16 bodies blocked the stairway. Only one, that of a doctor, seemed alive. He was removed first but died in a hospital...
...They're all gassed. It's film gas," he cried on seeing the victims. "Clear the way. Give them more air. Have we oxygen enough? Firemen, more firemen!" Dr. John Phillips, another of the founders of the Clinic left the wrecked building after working long among the victims. He started to walk home, collapsed...