August 28, 2018 • 44 mins
1946 was a particularly deadly year for hotel fires in the US. Fires killed hundreds of people in Chicago, Dubuque, Dallas and, in Atlanta, the worst hotel fire in American history broke out. Find out how they made staying in hotels safe.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there.
The gang's all here, which means that it's time for
stuff you should know, So settle down, everybody be quiet. Yeah,
(00:24):
the hotel fire edition, which will not be chuck full
of laughs probably No, No, I really won't. Um. I
don't know what it is about hotel fires that always
fascinated me, but they did. I think it was the
MGM Grand fire that got me. Um. Yeah, but there's
(00:45):
just something extra creepy about a hotel fire to me. Um.
And it turns out that there are there have been
some some big ones and some bad ones, and in
this one particular year, and of them happened that America
finally got off it stuff and started doing something about it. Yeah.
And also while reading this, I was I was kind
(01:09):
of thinking, like, why weren't there a dozen more of
these that year or in any surrounding year when you
look at how uh well, how unsafe things were, and
how you know, I know, people complain about the government
regulating things, but yeah, sometimes it's nice to say you
(01:29):
should have fire sprinklers and fire alarms or you can't
do business. Yeah, that's a really good point, and this
is a great example of that. You're right. It's also
a great example of how people smoking can used to
be able to just kill dozens or scores of people
by falling asleep with a cigarette or tossing it somewhere
(01:49):
or something stupid. You know. Yeah, I mean one of
these hotels had uh And we'll get into the nitty
gritty of the just how flammable these places were back then.
And it's amaze using the uh steps that they've taken
over the years to make things UH safer. But I
think one of these places had like seven layers of
(02:09):
wallpaper upon wallpaper, which were all highly highly flammable. Yeah,
like there burlap walls sometimes like stuff that just if
you look at it wrong, it'll catch fire. It's like,
what did you just say, Yeah, I'm catching fire. They
were using Firebug special brand wallpaper that bad. It wouldn't
(02:32):
surprise me. Well, of course they wouldn't do that, but everything,
I don't know, it was just everything was really flammable.
It seemed like flammable, dangerous pajamas were very flammable. This
everything was flammable back then, way more than these days.
All the things you smoke in right, smoking jackets were flammable. Yeah,
cigarettes flammable. So this this one year, so there were
(02:54):
tons and tons of hotel fires, like it was, it
was a thing. Um. But in nineteen forty six it
just got particularly bad and it was just coincidence. There
wasn't anything really that connected these fires, but there were
a handful of hotel fires that year that happened quickly
(03:16):
enough and we're big enough or or it happened um
close enough to one another, i should say, and then
we're big enough had enough of a casualties in um
deaths from them that that it caught the attention of
the public and and something was finally done. And it
was nineteen six when it happened. And the first one
(03:38):
was in June, yes, June five, in Chicago, Illinois, the
LaSalle Hotel. Uh. So here's how this one went down.
That was it was after the school year had ended,
so this hotel was really packed. Um, A lot of
families would and still do if you live in in
(03:58):
the suburbs of rural areas, would flood into the city
after the school year. They bring their kids, they go shopping,
they go to the zoo, they do city things. Uh
as you know, sort of like a post school vacation.
And so all of this hotel was full, one thousand rooms.
Apparently we're fully occupied and uh like so many of
(04:20):
these they started late at night. Yeah, and the cocktail lounge,
the Silver Grill cocktail lounge on the ground floor of
the LaSalle, and the cocktail wait staff had a longstanding
method of disposing of cigarette butts at the end of
the night from all the ash trays, from the empty
the ash trays, They just dump them in a cardboard
(04:41):
box that they kept in a closet behind the bar. Yeah.
I thought you were gonna say they had a way
of getting people out of the bar, which is crank. Now,
usually you crank. What was that really bad band that
everyone hates Special No, that's when everyone loves it. Was
(05:01):
a Canadian band that everyone makes fun of all the time. Rush. No,
you can say they cranked and nickelback. No, that although
I don't know what that would have done to people
in their minds might have been blown. Maybe they were
a band out of time and place. Yeah, uh so
(05:22):
they didn't. They didn't um blare any nickelback. Everybody just
left on their own accord. But after they left, this
box of smoldering cigarette butts cardboard box of smoldering cigarette
butts in the closet in one of the world's most
flammable hotels, UM caught like their luck ran out. I
can't believe that it didn't happen sooner, but that's what
(05:44):
happened this Um. Somebody I think smelled smoke, and very
quickly after that, Um, they saw a little bit of
flames coming from beneath the paneling around the wall. Right. No,
but here's a mistake. Number two comes in, chuck. And
this is a recurring theme too with these hotel fires. Um,
(06:06):
everyone said we got this, and some drunken people went
and grabbed a Seltzer bottle and started to try to
put the fire out themselves. Yeah. I mean it's hard
to or rather it's easy to cast stones in the
year two thousand eighteen. But I imagine if I was
(06:27):
hammered at a bar at two twenty in the morning
and I saw a little smoke in a little flame,
my first reaction would probably be like man let's extinguish
this real quick and not let me run and call
the fire department. But that's exactly what you should always do,
is running call the fire department. Yeah, that's that's I mean,
that's what I learned from researching this is that's the implication.
(06:48):
Just don't don't assume that you can handle any fire.
That's what the fire department is there for. They're more
than happy to come out to your call and um
deal with it. And you don't have to be embarrassed.
If it was just a little fire, sure they'll make
fun of you, but it will be behind your back. Yeah.
But this one was especially egregious because apparently from that
moment that they saw those flames and smelled the smoke,
(07:10):
it took about fifteen minutes before anybody called the fire department,
apparently because they were arguing over or concerned at least
over who had the authority in the hotel to call
the fire department, which I don't get. There was a
protocol like you had to be of a certain level
of management, I believe, to to officially call in a
(07:32):
fire call to the fire department. Yeah. I think anybody
who sees the flames should be qualified to call the
fire department, right, Yeah, but that was a huge, huge delay.
Fifteen minutes in this place, as you'll see, um was
a big deal and what matter, that's all it took
rather that fifteen minutes. Yeah too, like it was done
(07:54):
after that. Yeah, And they figured out pretty quickly when
they ran it to um tell the manager that it
was on fire. After they tried that seltzer bottle thing. Um,
I think the flames just went and they started. They
all ran away because they saw that this was this
is bad. And then there was another fifteen minutes on
top of that. And in the meantime, this sal's cocktail
(08:14):
lounge and actually a lot of the lobby had just
been redone in this nicely veneered wood um and everything
flammable that they could possibly come up with. And so
that fifteen minutes was very substantial and letting this fire
really get going. Yeah, they said, hey, we have this
great new uh bar and lounge, but we need to
ventilate it because everyone's smoking. So we're gonna cut a
(08:36):
hole in the elevator shaft and all of a sudden
you have a chimney, and that'll be a common thread.
Here is just how many big open areas, whether it
be a trans and window above the room doors being open,
which happened a lot back then because there wasn't air
conditioning in these buildings. It's a big point. Uh. It
just really exacerbates of fire once it gets going. And
(09:00):
with a little sal in particular, the fact that they
had cut a hole, an air hole from the place
where the fire started into a central open shaft going
up into the hotel. Um. That's one thing, but leading
into this this um elevator shaft, there were also air
holes on every floor because these fire doors that were
(09:23):
supposed to close off each floor from the central stairwell
have been propped open to allow air to flow through better.
And then like you said, there were windows above the
doors that were open a little bit, the transoms, and
that was letting in air from the outside into the
hotel itself. So the flames and the smoke and the
fumes were able to just rise that much more quickly
(09:45):
because of the series of little, tiny decisions that individual
people had made that all came together to turn this
thing into a conflagration. Yeah, and I'm not sure if
it was a little sal or one of the other
ones but that they all seemed to have trans and
they all seemed to make a big difference because they
were largely open because one of them, uh, they found
(10:06):
in the rooms where the transoms were closed, the fire
damage wasn't so bad, but in the ones where they
were open, they were just you know, gutted. Right. So
there was, um a few things that happened. Right as
this fire is getting really bad. Um the fire department
starts to show up, and ultimately three firefighters from sixty
one companies showed up to this fire to fight it,
(10:27):
which is just an enormous amount even for back then,
especially for back then. Um. And they're not just firefighters,
there are actually people at the hotel who were working
to save lives. In particular, Chuck, there was a switchboard
operator at the hotel who stayed on to call individual
(10:49):
rooms because this fire started after midnight, so most of
the people in the hotel were in their rooms asleep.
So this operator was calling every room and saying, there's
a fire, get out of the hotel and hang up
and call the next one. And she actually died in
the fire because she stayed on to call as many
rooms as possible. And the fact that more people didn't die.
Out of more than a thousand people, ultimately sixty one died.
(11:12):
You can basically attribute to this this lady's heroism for
staying on and giving her life to to tell as
many people as as possible that there was a fire
in the hotel. Yeah, that's amazing. And and she had
to do that because there was no alarm system, so
not even a bell ringing out. I think he said
three hundred firefighters in. Only three of these fire units
(11:36):
in the entire city had two way radios, so the
word couldn't get around fast enough. In the end, they
got about sixty UM units there, but by that time
it was just too little, too late. But the fact,
like you said, I mean, this had more guests than
any of the other hotels staying there, and the fact
that only sixty one people died out of the thousand
(11:57):
is it's pretty amazing. Yeah. There there was also another
pair of heroes who were I think sailors um They
rescued twenty seven people between the two of them. They
just kept running back into the hotel and dragging people out. Amazing. Yeah,
it is amazing what like something like that does to people,
To some people brings out just amazing stuff in them,
(12:18):
you know. Yeah. So two weeks later, on June nineteenth,
I mean, America was still sort of recovering from this news. Uh,
nineteen people died at the Hotel Canfield in Dubuque, Iowa.
And it really was eerily similar. Like it seemed like
none of these buildings had sprinklers or alarms. They were
(12:40):
all highly combustible. They all had these big open staircases,
and the fire doors were open, right, And an open
fire door is not a fire door, no, And I
mean like they had like good fire doors. But if
it's open, yeah, it's it's just a really easy place
for smoke and fire and aired feed the fire to
(13:01):
just move through. Um. And the at the at the Canfield,
I think that I think they had built onto the hotel,
the hotel, and you said this is a Dubuke, Iowa, right,
They had originally built the hotel and then added on
and the news the new section was doing fairly well.
But when the um when the the old section, which
(13:26):
is where the cocktail lounge was where the fire started again. Um,
the uh, when that burned, like that burned substantially, they
had to tear it down afterward, and I have to
correct myself. I made fun of the Lassalle's wait staff
for um, putting the cigarette butts into a box. No one,
(13:46):
no one in Chicago would do something that careless. You
would have to live in Dubuke to do something that careless.
Because it was actually at the Canfield where that fire
was started like that. Yeah, there was an employee who
opened that little closet, uh, also known as the cigarette
dumping room. I guess at the back of the lounge.
Um by this time that the bar had emptied out.
(14:09):
And uh, this this kid you know again doesn't call
immediately the fire department. He runs to find the manager,
which you know, a kid working there again, I don't
that may have been protocol, but you're you're probably trained
to go tell the manager of any anything like that.
And one William Canfield was a manager. He actually didn't
(14:30):
call right away either. He ran to get a fire extinguisher,
ran back there. Everything was fully on fire. Hammed HAMMEDA. Yeah,
at that point he knew what was going on. And uh,
you know, some of these people burned to death, many
of them on the upper floors, uh, were affixiated by smoke.
And another recurring thing that you'll see is people jumping
(14:53):
into nets or climbing down sheets tied together, or fire escapes.
Some of them made it. Some of them, Yeah, I
think a lot of the ones who tied their bed
sheets into ropes and and shimmy down actually did make it. Um.
But I think ultimately there were um thirty people who
were rescued jumping into nets, seven were carried down by ladders, um.
(15:19):
And there were a hundred guests that managed to escape.
I think the total number of guests who died were nineteen.
Nineteen people died, So again, it could have been a
lot worse. The fire department hadn't have gotten as many
people out, or as many people hadn't have like, you know,
made their own ropes to shimmy down. But again, this
(15:40):
was like less than two weeks after the fire in
Chicago and two days chuck. Again, this is making national news,
these huge fires, right, people stayed in hotels. It was
like a big deal if if a lot of people
died in a hotel fire. Two days after the Canfield
Hotel in Dubuque in June, on June one, there was
(16:03):
another fire and this was was in Dallas at the
Baker Hotel. Yeah, and this one seems to be uh
like the hot Shot placed to be the luxury hotel
in the city. Uh. Not only did it host people
from at like you know, high falutin people from out
of town, but they had several you know, well to
do restaurants in ballrooms and things. So many locals uh
(16:27):
hung out here as well, like uh like the big
bands and the swing bands of the twenties and thirties
would play here, but they were forced to wear stets
and hats when they did, probably so this was local custom. Uh.
And this was a gas explosion at this one, um,
so it wasn't the fault of someone dumping cigarette butts
or anything like that. Uh. And ten people ended up
(16:49):
dying in this one, injured over forty. And the only
reason that this one seemed to have a um they
got away lighter lighter with the death count was that
it was in a sub basement and it never fully
like went through the rest of the hotel. Right. But
again this is so three fires in the month of
June claimed the lives of ninety people, one right after
(17:14):
the other. And this has America's attention, right, But really,
the whole thing just kind of set the stage for
what would be the worst hotel fire in the history
of the United States. Um, that would come in December,
and we'll take a break and we'll get to the
Wine Cough Hotel fire after this. So we're in Atlanta,
(18:01):
Georgia right literally and in the way back machine. Okay,
because this happened in Atlanta, and we briefly mentioned this
in one episode a while back and said, hey, we
should do an episode on that. Did we I can't
(18:22):
remember why, but we mentioned it and um or maybe
as a listener mail or something. But here we are
making good for once on a promise. Yeah, not even
remembering that we've made the promise, just stumbling backwards into
fulfilling that promise. It may have been skyscrapers, because the
Wine Coff Hotel in Atlanta was fifteen stories high and
when it was built in nineteen thirteen, it was one
(18:45):
of it was considered a skyscraper in one of Atlanta's
first right. Um, yeah, fifteen stories in nineteen thirteen, that's
nothing to sneeze at, especially in Atlanta too, Right. Is
there a website converter for how many stories that would be? Today?
Let's see it's fifty thousand, big Max Tall. UM. So
the the Wine coff is actually still around today. It's
(19:08):
called the Ellis Hotel now down by UM Philips Arena
downtown UM. And back in n like you said, it
was a it was a pretty swine hotel in the
Atlanta area. UM. And this was in December, December seven,
that was the fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor. And there
(19:28):
were a pretty decent amount of people staying in the
Wine Cough that night. I think, um, how many was
it a thousand? No, a couple of hundred. I'm sorry,
it was a thousand who were in the LaSalle, But
there was, um, I think three hundred people staying in
the Wine Cough. People from out of town, A lot
of them from out of town, people who were shopping
(19:49):
for Christmas. There was a contingent of high school kids
from Rome who were Rome Georgia much different, who were
um part of the tri hi Y, which is a
Christian group, and they had come because they were going
to be take place in a mock legislature. And then um,
(20:10):
there were a lot of Vets returning from World War Two.
There's just a lot of people hanging out in the
wine cough that night. Yeah, and this one we should
point out this, Like so many buildings and especially hotels
at the time, we're advertised as fireproof. Um. Obviously, pre
even fires were a problem, and it was probably on
(20:32):
people's minds, so they started things like the unsinkable Titanic
and fireproof buildings, like things were being touted as safe
and somewhat indestructible. But but by this time, Chuck, I
would have been like, well, I'm staying away from that
because because it's basically tempting fade apparently, because when you
(20:52):
call something unsinkable or fireproof, it burns to the ground
or sinks. Yeah. But here's the thing. The outside was fireproof, Okay,
So that there was I guess there was some fine
print there, because as you said, the ls Hotel still stands,
and at the end of this horrible fire, which we're
(21:12):
gonna detail, uh, the outside was still okay. It was
the inside where all the people and stuff are that
matters and was not fireproof at all. Right, So this one,
the Wine Coff Hotel fire. Again, it's the worst hotel
fire in the United States history. Hopefully it stays that
way forever. Um. But it was started by a mystery.
(21:36):
They still are not entirely sure what happened. But at
about three am on December seven, uh, somebody, no, I'm sorry.
It was the elevator operator who was traveling up and
down the elevator just doing her thing, and around the
fifth floor she noticed that she smelled smoke. So she
(21:57):
bolts all the way down to the ground floor and
runs out in a lobby and starts shouting fire, and
that kicks off a series of events that, um, they're
pretty substantial. Yeah, And keep in mind this fireproof hotel.
Not only did it have no sprinkler system and no
alarm system like seemingly every other building, there were no
fire doors and no fire escapes, so it seemed especially
(22:22):
fire prone, not fireproof at all. But I wonder if
they were saying, we don't even need that stuff because
this building is fireproof. Maybe, but boy, I mean they
didn't think that through at all, because uh, yeah, like
I said, what's on the inside counts. If the inside
is on fire, it doesn't matter if like, well, the
bricks still solid, guys, you know, still standing. The structure
(22:47):
is all right. So there are a couple of theories
as to how this one started. Um, there were a
group of dudes. They're playing poker. Um just met up
in a room to play a game of poker or
play poker all night, and they were on the third floor.
Some people say that it started with a mattress in
the hallway outside their suite. So someone that was in
(23:08):
this game got ticked off, left the room and set
this mattress on fire on purpose. Yes, man named Roy McCulloch,
who was an ex con and then a con again
later on, whom had allegedly seen a guy who rated
him out in prison, and that he'd set the fire
after he left the poker game because he was trying
(23:30):
to kill the guy and ended up killing a hundred
nineteen people. That's actually the position of a pair of
journalists UM named Sam Hayes and Alan Goodwin, who wrote
The Wine Calf Fire, a book. They very squarely placed
the whole thing on Roy McCullough's shoulders. Yeah, but that
is just a theory because other people in the Mayor
(23:51):
of Atlanta, mayor Hartsfield at the time did invite fire
experts in to to look it over, and I think
they kind of roundly that it was not some mattress
set on fire deliberately because people smelled like burning gas
or tires or some weird specific smoke spell smoke smell,
(24:11):
and they thought that there was an accelerant and it
was in another part of the hotel. It wasn't near
the mattress at all. And uh so that would explain why,
you know, the stairway went up so quickly. Well that, yeah,
and that was the official Atlanta Fire Department's position that
somebody had carelessly tossed a cigarette somewhere around the fourth
floor stairwell and it had gone up. Which I mean,
(24:34):
if that's all it takes for your hotel to go up,
that's pretty bad too, you know. Yeah, and the wine
coff I believe that that was the one where it
had the stairwell going up around the elevator shaft, right, Yes,
so we have to talk about this for a second.
They had a central elevator shaft, which a game connect
very easily like a chimney um and the one the
one single way up or down, was in a stair
(25:00):
case that went around the elevator shaft. So when the
elevator shaft is filled with hot gases and smoke, so
too is the staircase, which meant that when the the
bottom floors starting around the I think the third or
fourth or fifth floor started to catch fire and smoke
started pouring out, it went up and everybody above those
(25:21):
floors was trapped in the hotel up to fifteen floors.
And when the fire department came out, they realized very quickly,
and I'm sure they already knew this. The highest that
they had a ladder, the highest ladder they had could
go up to eighty five ft. Well that's about eight stories.
This is a fifteen story building, So the people in
(25:41):
the higher stories were really in trouble. Yeah, and inside
this hotel too, there was a lot of poor design
going on. They were um there were a lot of
hidden voids, there were false ceilings, There were places where
the fire could be spreading and no one even knows
it's spreading. Again, these and lobbies and mezzanines, open stairways,
(26:02):
the transoms really came into play again with people just
getting fresh air into their rooms, even though they do
mention air conditioning in the wine called foot It was
December Atlanta. Yeah, I'm not sure why either, because I mean,
I can understand why somebody would open the window to
stick their head out. But yeah, since it's cold, their
the transom should be shut. I don't know. Maybe yeah,
(26:25):
maybe the room was stuffy or something like that. Well,
everyone was smoking, so maybe they just wanted to let
out some of their cigarettes smoke, right, or they ran
out of smoke, so they were letting everybody else's smoke in.
It's a good point, uh, is it sure? Okay? Should
we take another break? Yeah? All right, we'll talk about
how most people perished and what was done about this
(26:46):
right after this, So the Wine Cough, Uh, I mean,
(27:18):
in all these hotels, people tried to escape through fire
escapes and stuff because they had them. The Wine Cough
did not have fire escapes, like we said. So there
were a lot of people um tying bed sheets. They
were trying to jump onto net sell by firefighters. They
were trying to leap onto adjacent buildings from lower floors. Uh.
(27:40):
And some people just you know, you you jump because
you think that's your best bet. Uh. And some of
those people actually survived, many of them died. One very
sad story was one person jumped and actually survived because
they landed on bodies of people that had died below them. Yeah,
it's really tough, um to get across. What what the scene?
(28:05):
How chaotic this scene was like there were bodies just
falling everywhere. The firefighters had nets, but people were jumping
in totally uncoordinated ways and so very frequently there are
so many people coming down that they didn't have enough
nets for them all, so they had to basically pick
who to try to catch with their net. Um. There
(28:26):
was a guy named Jimmy Cahill. I believe he was
from Albany, Georgia, and he was a hero of the
Wine Cough fire because he escaped and ran next door
to a building that that shared an alley between it
and the Wine Cough and found like some painters scaffolding,
like just like a stout board and put it between
(28:49):
the building next door that he'd run to and the
room where his mother was trapped on the sixth floor
of the Wine Cough and got her out and started
getting other people out too, and other people, including the
fire department, started laying ladders down and getting people out
these this way. So a lot of people escape from
going from the wine Coughs to the building next door,
but other people even climbing across this ten foot alley
(29:11):
to the next building to safety. We're getting knocked off
of the ladders by people who were jumping from higher buildings.
Like just total chaos, Smoke everywhere, people screaming. Um, just
just chaos, man. I can't whenever, my mind kind of
like imagines what that must have been like it just
kind of snaps back to the present time as quick
(29:33):
as possible. It's just tough to to conceive of. Yeah,
a numbers wise, um man, this is just awful. Forty
eight people were literally burned alive. Uh, forty people were
asphyxiated by smoking fumes. Thirty one people died from jumping
or falling or being knocked off or shoved or whatever.
(29:53):
And uh, that's the total number of what was it
a hundred and nineteen total, And then thirty nine of
those hundred nineteen people were under twenty um and I
think a lot of them were those kids there for
the for the Macha delegation or whatever. Yep, the super
super sad. And you know, the good news is out
of all of this is it's sad that it took this.
(30:16):
But after this spate of fires, the government finally was
like we've got to do something here because people are
just it seems like left and right dying in hotel fires. Yeah,
and um, what's sad is there were people who had
already been writing all of these recommendations of like best practices.
There's a UM, the Life Safety Code from the National
(30:40):
Fire Protection Association had basically been saying like, here's here's
what you gotta do. It's not like we didn't know
how to prevent losses of life and hotel fires. It's
just that people weren't making hotel operators do these things.
And so these fire policies stayed local, right, So those
(31:01):
it's still to this day a patchwork of regulations in
a lot of ways. But there they these little towns
and cities were so affected by these fires in that
they started adopting these policies, including things like you got
a hotel, you've gotta have a fire sprinkler system. That
was one fire alarm system, I mean really low hanging fruit,
(31:23):
but that a lot of hotels just didn't have at
the time. Suddenly they were forced to. Yeah, fire doors
um were required then pretty much everywhere. They were required
to be closed at all times. Uh, those transoms, those
troublesome transoms that admittedly I think are great and love. Um,
they were basically prohibited from that point on, uh, you know,
(31:48):
fresh air, air conditioning or now they said no more transoms. Uh.
And then fire escapes, of course, were mandated pretty much everywhere. Yeah.
And if you if you look around, like if you're
into an office building or something, you ever go down
the stairwell, like it's totally unadorned. It's concrete and metal
and it's painted. There's nothing, there's no are there's no carpet,
there's no fake plants, there's nothing there. And the reason
(32:10):
why is because that stairwell is meant to prevent fire
from getting any further. There's there's nothing to burn. And
a lot of that is because of these ninety six
fires and the changes in the code. It changed like
a fire door, it's a self closing door, it's a
heavy door. It's meant to be that way, and it
says like doors to remain closed at all times. Um.
(32:32):
All of that came out of this, and there used
to be a big debate over whether existing hotels would
be grandfathered in anytime the code was updated. And that
was the custom of the land and again these nineteen
forties six hotel fires changed that. It was if you
have a hotel and you're doing business, you have to
retroactively add a fire sprinkler system. Now. Yeah, and Truman,
(32:54):
President Truman the following year got involved, uh and specifically
called for a national conference on fire pre engine So
while you know, I don't think there were any federal regulations,
like you said, it was still local. Uh. They did. Um,
they did change a lot of the like national and
federal building codes at least, yes, And I think it
(33:16):
is still that way to this day. It's localities that
are responsible for fire codes, right. Yeah. And I think
there's been ever since then an I on design and safety,
whereas back then it was just like let's make this
the most beautiful uh thing. I mean, I think in
that first Chicago fire, didn't they even test the paneling
and found that the oak paneling that they used was
(33:39):
like five times more flammable than just regular oak paneling
because they you know, it was coated with this special
thing to make it look pretty, right, this like the veneer.
I think they used it really really flammable. Absolutely. Um.
There was that that MGM fire in nineteen eighty. That
was so bad. It came decades after these reforms were made.
(34:02):
That was that Vegas. Yeah, it was a big deal.
Like there, it was on TV while it was happening. Um,
there's footage of like people in the higher um floors,
like like hanging out of their window and stuff. Um.
And there are a lot of people in the hotel
at this time. People died. I think seven of those
were hotel employees. Um. But it could have been way,
(34:26):
way worse. But the reason it was as bad as
it was again, A hundred and nineteen is the worst
hotel fired American history. This was eight five, so it
was pretty close to as bad as it gets. But
the reason why it was as bad as it was
just because the people who built the MGM grand like
balked at the cost of adding a sprinkler system when
(34:46):
they built it, and the people in Vegas who were
overseeing the fire code and enforcing it gave him a
pass because they were just glad that the MGM Graham
was building there and the think the fire sprinkler system
would have cost less than two hundred thousand dollars to
build in and they just didn't do it until after Yeah, exactly.
(35:08):
That's yeah, that's what I mean. Like, that's nineteen thirties stuff,
not nineteen eighties stuff. Look right above this, buddy, You
see that little fire sprinkler. Yeah, I know. Now it's
like cool to show your fire sprinklers, you know, and
the piping and all that. Forget your drop ceilings. Yeah,
it's all about open floor plants, which, by the way, Chuck,
(35:29):
I'm seeing more and more like of the the steady
drumbeat against open floor plans is like the worst idea
anyone's ever had as far as office spaces go. Yeah,
how they're just attention killer. It's not like I mean
you know that, like how often do I pester you
and bother you just because I can like lean back
and be like hey right. But they're so distracting, and
(35:53):
I predict they're going to be gone in the next
couple of years. Yeah, I don't know, man, remember like
back to the high key tubes or offices. I think
it's I don't know, I have no prediction. Actually, I
was gonna say, I think it's just gonna be more
working from home, and probably it will, but I don't
think we're done with offices yet. So I don't know
what's coming next. I went in an office building, uh
(36:17):
last week that had those really tall cubes that we
used to be in back in the day, and it
was weird. It was like, Man, I remember, I don't know.
I didn't like it. There was something about someone poking
their head above the wall gophering. Yeah it was. It
was called I think so yeah, I don't know. I
never liked that. I prefer to see my enemies coming,
So I think I like the open thing. Yeah, you did.
(36:40):
Used to be a lot more jumpy with those high
cuber man. I hated him. Uh you got anything else? Yeah?
One more thing? Um, there's a very famous photograph from
the wine Cofugh fire. U That one a young Georgia
Tech student of Pulitzer Prize in ninety seven. He was
a PhD student named Arnold Hardy and uh he was
(37:02):
he lived kind of close by. He was on his
way back from dancing, heard about this fire, called and
found out where it is. Because he fancied himself of
a you know, kind of amateur photographer, grabbed his camera,
took a cab over there and was the first photographer
on the scene and took a very famous photo of
a forty one year old secretary named Daisy mccomber in
(37:23):
mid fall from this building. Um, you know her, her
dress is blown up in her you know, nineteen forties
pantaloons are are showing and it's really a creepy picture. Um.
He ended up selling the rights to the a P
for three hundred bucks. They tried to hire him as
a photographer, you know, their Atlanta guy, and he refused
(37:47):
and um apparently too and this is not well known,
there was a drug store across the street named Lanes
that was closed and they needed supplies like emergency medical supplies,
and people were waiting on the owner to show up
and open it, and Hardy himself kicked in the door. Uh.
Ended up getting arrested for disorderly conduct, but the drug
store dropped the charges, even though they made him pay
(38:09):
for the door, which he paid for with his photo proceeds,
I guess. But as apparently they like, at least in Atlanta,
local police were then required to have medical supplies in
their cars for the first time, and he always felt bad. Um.
I don't know if this is still true, but as
of a couple of years ago, his granddaughter was worked
(38:31):
at Twains indicator, and she kind of kept his memory alive.
He died in two thousand seven and said that he
was always kind of conflicted that he got this recognition
and this Pulitzer prize from such a tragedy. So did
did Daisy die? She lived, although it was hard to
find her because apparently I don't know if it was
because it was you know, her underwear was showing, but
(38:52):
and it was the nineties. She never came out and
was like, that's me. She would deny that it was her,
but they eventually found that it was Daisy mccomber and
she did live. Huh, well, that's good and she lived
at least very interesting. I've got one more thing. So
with the wine Cough Hotel fire, Um, when they showed up,
it was a one alarmed fire when they called, and
(39:14):
I was like, what is that? What does that mean?
And a one alarm fire to alarm fire or whatever.
So apparently the alarm is the number of firefighters and
equipment that are brought out. It's the number of units,
right yeah, or the number of people. And it varies
by municipality. So for example, in like I found in Louisville, Kentucky,
(39:35):
a one alarmed fire is twenty firefighters, five trucks, and
two commanders, and then with each alarm that number doubles. Right,
So when the Atlanta Fire Department showed up on the scene,
it was a one alarmed fire, and it like right
when they got there, the chief turned it into a
two and then three alarmed fire, and then within another
(39:56):
fifteen minutes they turned in a four alarm fire. And
by with I think an hour or so after this
fire had started, they were calling firefighters, um who are
off duty from other cities. Basically anyone who could get
there fast enough and their fire truck came out to
this to fight this fire. Wow, it was a big one.
(40:17):
Uh okay, And that's it. That's all I've got for
hotel fires. I got nothing else. Well, if you want
to know more about hotel fires, you can search those
terms on the internet, because I don't think How Stuff
Works has anything about it. But that's okay because I
said search bar, which means it's time for a listener mail.
Uh this is I'm gonna call this um good job.
(40:43):
That's my monica. Sellis okay. I was listening to how
board breaking works, guys, and you got into conversation on
women's tennis and the shrieking and the yelling and wondering
about stephie Graff or Monica Sellis. You also mentioned Monica
sells Is stabbed. This is where my useless knowledge comes in. Guys,
most women tennis players do shriek, and I would personally
(41:03):
this chuck speaking, I think most men do too, right,
m hmm, I hear a lot of grunting, sure, but
he says, Monica Sellis was the one that really had
a very loud and high shriek, so loud in fact,
that many of her opponents would complain during the match
and she would actually get warnings from the chair umpire. Uh.
They would even measure how loud her shriek was. I
didn't know that. Yeah, that seems weird. Another interesting thing
(41:26):
to me is that when Monica Sellis was stabbed in
the back, she was courtside uh, on the courtside change,
resting in her chair. The person who stabbed her was
not a fan. He was a Steffi Graph fan who
was worried that Sellis would beat her record. Oh my gosh,
I know you believe that. Did you see the movie
about um oh who who? Was it Nancy carry Tanya Harding?
(41:49):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, basically I didn't realize that that
had happened in tennis as well. Did you see that movie? Yeah?
It was good. Huh, it was, it was, It was
very good. I was I was surprised that she human
is Tanya Harding? So well, you know that was local,
locally made. No, that was obviously made in Oregon. No,
like the Golden Buddha Chinese restaurant indicators there. Okay, yeah,
(42:11):
I thought. I was like, is that it's the Golden
Buddha chain because I think I've eaten at that one.
And yeah, okay, you're right. I did notice that, and
we had quite a few of the old stuff. You
should know. Crew members worked on it. Awesome. Yeah, that's cool.
So anyway back to the email, Monica Sellis was very young,
just starting her career off, and Steffi had already been
playing for a while. Monica had been on a terror
and was starting to beat stephie Graff. Because of the
(42:33):
stabbing incident, the Professional Tennis Tour increased security protocol. If
you watch tennis on TV today, you will see that
there are always security on the court during the changeovers.
The security guard actually will stand behind the tennis player
facing the crowd. And that is from Rawle Rodriguez and Topeka, Kansas.
Nice thank you or Raoul r A U L. Rodriguez,
(42:59):
Thank you from Topeka Huh, Topeka, Kansas holding it down well,
thanks a lot, Raoul and everybody out there in Topeka,
Kansas for listening to us, and uh, wherever you are,
you can hang out with us on the social media's
at And by the way, I'm well aware that media
is media's is not the plural of medium. You know
(43:22):
that media is plural itself. I'm just kidding, so lighten up.
Someone said that and I was like, what's a joke, sir. Yeah,
So if you want to hang out with us on
social media's you know, I'm just saying it out of spite. Um,
you can go to stuffy sho dot com find all
that stuff there. You can send us an email to
Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for more
(43:49):
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there.
The gang's all here, which means that it's time for
stuff you should know, So settle down, everybody be quiet. Yeah,
(00:24):
the hotel fire edition, which will not be chuck full
of laughs probably No, No, I really won't. Um. I
don't know what it is about hotel fires that always
fascinated me, but they did. I think it was the
MGM Grand fire that got me. Um. Yeah, but there's
(00:45):
just something extra creepy about a hotel fire to me. Um.
And it turns out that there are there have been
some some big ones and some bad ones, and in
this one particular year, and of them happened that America
finally got off it stuff and started doing something about it. Yeah.
And also while reading this, I was I was kind
(01:09):
of thinking, like, why weren't there a dozen more of
these that year or in any surrounding year when you
look at how uh well, how unsafe things were, and
how you know, I know, people complain about the government
regulating things, but yeah, sometimes it's nice to say you
(01:29):
should have fire sprinklers and fire alarms or you can't
do business. Yeah, that's a really good point, and this
is a great example of that. You're right. It's also
a great example of how people smoking can used to
be able to just kill dozens or scores of people
by falling asleep with a cigarette or tossing it somewhere
(01:49):
or something stupid. You know. Yeah, I mean one of
these hotels had uh And we'll get into the nitty
gritty of the just how flammable these places were back then.
And it's amaze using the uh steps that they've taken
over the years to make things UH safer. But I
think one of these places had like seven layers of
(02:09):
wallpaper upon wallpaper, which were all highly highly flammable. Yeah,
like there burlap walls sometimes like stuff that just if
you look at it wrong, it'll catch fire. It's like,
what did you just say, Yeah, I'm catching fire. They
were using Firebug special brand wallpaper that bad. It wouldn't
(02:32):
surprise me. Well, of course they wouldn't do that, but everything,
I don't know, it was just everything was really flammable.
It seemed like flammable, dangerous pajamas were very flammable. This
everything was flammable back then, way more than these days.
All the things you smoke in right, smoking jackets were flammable. Yeah,
cigarettes flammable. So this this one year, so there were
(02:54):
tons and tons of hotel fires, like it was, it
was a thing. Um. But in nineteen forty six it
just got particularly bad and it was just coincidence. There
wasn't anything really that connected these fires, but there were
a handful of hotel fires that year that happened quickly
(03:16):
enough and we're big enough or or it happened um
close enough to one another, i should say, and then
we're big enough had enough of a casualties in um
deaths from them that that it caught the attention of
the public and and something was finally done. And it
was nineteen six when it happened. And the first one
(03:38):
was in June, yes, June five, in Chicago, Illinois, the
LaSalle Hotel. Uh. So here's how this one went down.
That was it was after the school year had ended,
so this hotel was really packed. Um, A lot of
families would and still do if you live in in
(03:58):
the suburbs of rural areas, would flood into the city
after the school year. They bring their kids, they go shopping,
they go to the zoo, they do city things. Uh
as you know, sort of like a post school vacation.
And so all of this hotel was full, one thousand rooms.
Apparently we're fully occupied and uh like so many of
(04:20):
these they started late at night. Yeah, and the cocktail lounge,
the Silver Grill cocktail lounge on the ground floor of
the LaSalle, and the cocktail wait staff had a longstanding
method of disposing of cigarette butts at the end of
the night from all the ash trays, from the empty
the ash trays, They just dump them in a cardboard
(04:41):
box that they kept in a closet behind the bar. Yeah.
I thought you were gonna say they had a way
of getting people out of the bar, which is crank. Now,
usually you crank. What was that really bad band that
everyone hates Special No, that's when everyone loves it. Was
(05:01):
a Canadian band that everyone makes fun of all the time. Rush. No,
you can say they cranked and nickelback. No, that although
I don't know what that would have done to people
in their minds might have been blown. Maybe they were
a band out of time and place. Yeah, uh so
(05:22):
they didn't. They didn't um blare any nickelback. Everybody just
left on their own accord. But after they left, this
box of smoldering cigarette butts cardboard box of smoldering cigarette
butts in the closet in one of the world's most
flammable hotels, UM caught like their luck ran out. I
can't believe that it didn't happen sooner, but that's what
(05:44):
happened this Um. Somebody I think smelled smoke, and very
quickly after that, Um, they saw a little bit of
flames coming from beneath the paneling around the wall. Right. No,
but here's a mistake. Number two comes in, chuck. And
this is a recurring theme too with these hotel fires. Um,
(06:06):
everyone said we got this, and some drunken people went
and grabbed a Seltzer bottle and started to try to
put the fire out themselves. Yeah. I mean it's hard
to or rather it's easy to cast stones in the
year two thousand eighteen. But I imagine if I was
(06:27):
hammered at a bar at two twenty in the morning
and I saw a little smoke in a little flame,
my first reaction would probably be like man let's extinguish
this real quick and not let me run and call
the fire department. But that's exactly what you should always do,
is running call the fire department. Yeah, that's that's I mean,
that's what I learned from researching this is that's the implication.
(06:48):
Just don't don't assume that you can handle any fire.
That's what the fire department is there for. They're more
than happy to come out to your call and um
deal with it. And you don't have to be embarrassed.
If it was just a little fire, sure they'll make
fun of you, but it will be behind your back. Yeah.
But this one was especially egregious because apparently from that
moment that they saw those flames and smelled the smoke,
(07:10):
it took about fifteen minutes before anybody called the fire department,
apparently because they were arguing over or concerned at least
over who had the authority in the hotel to call
the fire department, which I don't get. There was a
protocol like you had to be of a certain level
of management, I believe, to to officially call in a
(07:32):
fire call to the fire department. Yeah. I think anybody
who sees the flames should be qualified to call the
fire department, right, Yeah, but that was a huge, huge delay.
Fifteen minutes in this place, as you'll see, um was
a big deal and what matter, that's all it took
rather that fifteen minutes. Yeah too, like it was done
(07:54):
after that. Yeah, And they figured out pretty quickly when
they ran it to um tell the manager that it
was on fire. After they tried that seltzer bottle thing. Um,
I think the flames just went and they started. They
all ran away because they saw that this was this
is bad. And then there was another fifteen minutes on
top of that. And in the meantime, this sal's cocktail
(08:14):
lounge and actually a lot of the lobby had just
been redone in this nicely veneered wood um and everything
flammable that they could possibly come up with. And so
that fifteen minutes was very substantial and letting this fire
really get going. Yeah, they said, hey, we have this
great new uh bar and lounge, but we need to
ventilate it because everyone's smoking. So we're gonna cut a
(08:36):
hole in the elevator shaft and all of a sudden
you have a chimney, and that'll be a common thread.
Here is just how many big open areas, whether it
be a trans and window above the room doors being open,
which happened a lot back then because there wasn't air
conditioning in these buildings. It's a big point. Uh. It
just really exacerbates of fire once it gets going. And
(09:00):
with a little sal in particular, the fact that they
had cut a hole, an air hole from the place
where the fire started into a central open shaft going
up into the hotel. Um. That's one thing, but leading
into this this um elevator shaft, there were also air
holes on every floor because these fire doors that were
(09:23):
supposed to close off each floor from the central stairwell
have been propped open to allow air to flow through better.
And then like you said, there were windows above the
doors that were open a little bit, the transoms, and
that was letting in air from the outside into the
hotel itself. So the flames and the smoke and the
fumes were able to just rise that much more quickly
(09:45):
because of the series of little, tiny decisions that individual
people had made that all came together to turn this
thing into a conflagration. Yeah, and I'm not sure if
it was a little sal or one of the other
ones but that they all seemed to have trans and
they all seemed to make a big difference because they
were largely open because one of them, uh, they found
(10:06):
in the rooms where the transoms were closed, the fire
damage wasn't so bad, but in the ones where they
were open, they were just you know, gutted. Right. So
there was, um a few things that happened. Right as
this fire is getting really bad. Um the fire department
starts to show up, and ultimately three firefighters from sixty
one companies showed up to this fire to fight it,
(10:27):
which is just an enormous amount even for back then,
especially for back then. Um. And they're not just firefighters,
there are actually people at the hotel who were working
to save lives. In particular, Chuck, there was a switchboard
operator at the hotel who stayed on to call individual
(10:49):
rooms because this fire started after midnight, so most of
the people in the hotel were in their rooms asleep.
So this operator was calling every room and saying, there's
a fire, get out of the hotel and hang up
and call the next one. And she actually died in
the fire because she stayed on to call as many
rooms as possible. And the fact that more people didn't die.
Out of more than a thousand people, ultimately sixty one died.
(11:12):
You can basically attribute to this this lady's heroism for
staying on and giving her life to to tell as
many people as as possible that there was a fire
in the hotel. Yeah, that's amazing. And and she had
to do that because there was no alarm system, so
not even a bell ringing out. I think he said
three hundred firefighters in. Only three of these fire units
(11:36):
in the entire city had two way radios, so the
word couldn't get around fast enough. In the end, they
got about sixty UM units there, but by that time
it was just too little, too late. But the fact,
like you said, I mean, this had more guests than
any of the other hotels staying there, and the fact
that only sixty one people died out of the thousand
(11:57):
is it's pretty amazing. Yeah. There there was also another
pair of heroes who were I think sailors um They
rescued twenty seven people between the two of them. They
just kept running back into the hotel and dragging people out. Amazing. Yeah,
it is amazing what like something like that does to people,
To some people brings out just amazing stuff in them,
(12:18):
you know. Yeah. So two weeks later, on June nineteenth,
I mean, America was still sort of recovering from this news. Uh,
nineteen people died at the Hotel Canfield in Dubuque, Iowa.
And it really was eerily similar. Like it seemed like
none of these buildings had sprinklers or alarms. They were
(12:40):
all highly combustible. They all had these big open staircases,
and the fire doors were open, right, And an open
fire door is not a fire door, no, And I
mean like they had like good fire doors. But if
it's open, yeah, it's it's just a really easy place
for smoke and fire and aired feed the fire to
(13:01):
just move through. Um. And the at the at the Canfield,
I think that I think they had built onto the hotel,
the hotel, and you said this is a Dubuke, Iowa, right,
They had originally built the hotel and then added on
and the news the new section was doing fairly well.
But when the um when the the old section, which
(13:26):
is where the cocktail lounge was where the fire started again. Um,
the uh, when that burned, like that burned substantially, they
had to tear it down afterward, and I have to
correct myself. I made fun of the Lassalle's wait staff
for um, putting the cigarette butts into a box. No one,
(13:46):
no one in Chicago would do something that careless. You
would have to live in Dubuke to do something that careless.
Because it was actually at the Canfield where that fire
was started like that. Yeah, there was an employee who
opened that little closet, uh, also known as the cigarette
dumping room. I guess at the back of the lounge.
Um by this time that the bar had emptied out.
(14:09):
And uh, this this kid you know again doesn't call
immediately the fire department. He runs to find the manager,
which you know, a kid working there again, I don't
that may have been protocol, but you're you're probably trained
to go tell the manager of any anything like that.
And one William Canfield was a manager. He actually didn't
(14:30):
call right away either. He ran to get a fire extinguisher,
ran back there. Everything was fully on fire. Hammed HAMMEDA. Yeah,
at that point he knew what was going on. And uh,
you know, some of these people burned to death, many
of them on the upper floors, uh, were affixiated by smoke.
And another recurring thing that you'll see is people jumping
(14:53):
into nets or climbing down sheets tied together, or fire escapes.
Some of them made it. Some of them, Yeah, I
think a lot of the ones who tied their bed
sheets into ropes and and shimmy down actually did make it. Um.
But I think ultimately there were um thirty people who
were rescued jumping into nets, seven were carried down by ladders, um.
(15:19):
And there were a hundred guests that managed to escape.
I think the total number of guests who died were nineteen.
Nineteen people died, So again, it could have been a
lot worse. The fire department hadn't have gotten as many
people out, or as many people hadn't have like, you know,
made their own ropes to shimmy down. But again, this
(15:40):
was like less than two weeks after the fire in
Chicago and two days chuck. Again, this is making national news,
these huge fires, right, people stayed in hotels. It was
like a big deal if if a lot of people
died in a hotel fire. Two days after the Canfield
Hotel in Dubuque in June, on June one, there was
(16:03):
another fire and this was was in Dallas at the
Baker Hotel. Yeah, and this one seems to be uh
like the hot Shot placed to be the luxury hotel
in the city. Uh. Not only did it host people
from at like you know, high falutin people from out
of town, but they had several you know, well to
do restaurants in ballrooms and things. So many locals uh
(16:27):
hung out here as well, like uh like the big
bands and the swing bands of the twenties and thirties
would play here, but they were forced to wear stets
and hats when they did, probably so this was local custom. Uh.
And this was a gas explosion at this one, um,
so it wasn't the fault of someone dumping cigarette butts
or anything like that. Uh. And ten people ended up
(16:49):
dying in this one, injured over forty. And the only
reason that this one seemed to have a um they
got away lighter lighter with the death count was that
it was in a sub basement and it never fully
like went through the rest of the hotel. Right. But
again this is so three fires in the month of
June claimed the lives of ninety people, one right after
(17:14):
the other. And this has America's attention, right, But really,
the whole thing just kind of set the stage for
what would be the worst hotel fire in the history
of the United States. Um, that would come in December,
and we'll take a break and we'll get to the
Wine Cough Hotel fire after this. So we're in Atlanta,
(18:01):
Georgia right literally and in the way back machine. Okay,
because this happened in Atlanta, and we briefly mentioned this
in one episode a while back and said, hey, we
should do an episode on that. Did we I can't
(18:22):
remember why, but we mentioned it and um or maybe
as a listener mail or something. But here we are
making good for once on a promise. Yeah, not even
remembering that we've made the promise, just stumbling backwards into
fulfilling that promise. It may have been skyscrapers, because the
Wine Coff Hotel in Atlanta was fifteen stories high and
when it was built in nineteen thirteen, it was one
(18:45):
of it was considered a skyscraper in one of Atlanta's
first right. Um, yeah, fifteen stories in nineteen thirteen, that's
nothing to sneeze at, especially in Atlanta too, Right. Is
there a website converter for how many stories that would be? Today?
Let's see it's fifty thousand, big Max Tall. UM. So
the the Wine coff is actually still around today. It's
(19:08):
called the Ellis Hotel now down by UM Philips Arena
downtown UM. And back in n like you said, it
was a it was a pretty swine hotel in the
Atlanta area. UM. And this was in December, December seven,
that was the fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor. And there
(19:28):
were a pretty decent amount of people staying in the
Wine Cough that night. I think, um, how many was
it a thousand? No, a couple of hundred. I'm sorry,
it was a thousand who were in the LaSalle, But
there was, um, I think three hundred people staying in
the Wine Cough. People from out of town, A lot
of them from out of town, people who were shopping
(19:49):
for Christmas. There was a contingent of high school kids
from Rome who were Rome Georgia much different, who were
um part of the tri hi Y, which is a
Christian group, and they had come because they were going
to be take place in a mock legislature. And then um,
(20:10):
there were a lot of Vets returning from World War Two.
There's just a lot of people hanging out in the
wine cough that night. Yeah, and this one we should
point out this, Like so many buildings and especially hotels
at the time, we're advertised as fireproof. Um. Obviously, pre
even fires were a problem, and it was probably on
(20:32):
people's minds, so they started things like the unsinkable Titanic
and fireproof buildings, like things were being touted as safe
and somewhat indestructible. But but by this time, Chuck, I
would have been like, well, I'm staying away from that
because because it's basically tempting fade apparently, because when you
(20:52):
call something unsinkable or fireproof, it burns to the ground
or sinks. Yeah. But here's the thing. The outside was fireproof, Okay,
So that there was I guess there was some fine
print there, because as you said, the ls Hotel still stands,
and at the end of this horrible fire, which we're
(21:12):
gonna detail, uh, the outside was still okay. It was
the inside where all the people and stuff are that
matters and was not fireproof at all. Right, So this one,
the Wine Coff Hotel fire. Again, it's the worst hotel
fire in the United States history. Hopefully it stays that
way forever. Um. But it was started by a mystery.
(21:36):
They still are not entirely sure what happened. But at
about three am on December seven, uh, somebody, no, I'm sorry.
It was the elevator operator who was traveling up and
down the elevator just doing her thing, and around the
fifth floor she noticed that she smelled smoke. So she
(21:57):
bolts all the way down to the ground floor and
runs out in a lobby and starts shouting fire, and
that kicks off a series of events that, um, they're
pretty substantial. Yeah, And keep in mind this fireproof hotel.
Not only did it have no sprinkler system and no
alarm system like seemingly every other building, there were no
fire doors and no fire escapes, so it seemed especially
(22:22):
fire prone, not fireproof at all. But I wonder if
they were saying, we don't even need that stuff because
this building is fireproof. Maybe, but boy, I mean they
didn't think that through at all, because uh, yeah, like
I said, what's on the inside counts. If the inside
is on fire, it doesn't matter if like, well, the
bricks still solid, guys, you know, still standing. The structure
(22:47):
is all right. So there are a couple of theories
as to how this one started. Um, there were a
group of dudes. They're playing poker. Um just met up
in a room to play a game of poker or
play poker all night, and they were on the third floor.
Some people say that it started with a mattress in
the hallway outside their suite. So someone that was in
(23:08):
this game got ticked off, left the room and set
this mattress on fire on purpose. Yes, man named Roy McCulloch,
who was an ex con and then a con again
later on, whom had allegedly seen a guy who rated
him out in prison, and that he'd set the fire
after he left the poker game because he was trying
(23:30):
to kill the guy and ended up killing a hundred
nineteen people. That's actually the position of a pair of
journalists UM named Sam Hayes and Alan Goodwin, who wrote
The Wine Calf Fire, a book. They very squarely placed
the whole thing on Roy McCullough's shoulders. Yeah, but that
is just a theory because other people in the Mayor
(23:51):
of Atlanta, mayor Hartsfield at the time did invite fire
experts in to to look it over, and I think
they kind of roundly that it was not some mattress
set on fire deliberately because people smelled like burning gas
or tires or some weird specific smoke spell smoke smell,
(24:11):
and they thought that there was an accelerant and it
was in another part of the hotel. It wasn't near
the mattress at all. And uh so that would explain why,
you know, the stairway went up so quickly. Well that, yeah,
and that was the official Atlanta Fire Department's position that
somebody had carelessly tossed a cigarette somewhere around the fourth
floor stairwell and it had gone up. Which I mean,
(24:34):
if that's all it takes for your hotel to go up,
that's pretty bad too, you know. Yeah, and the wine
coff I believe that that was the one where it
had the stairwell going up around the elevator shaft, right, Yes,
so we have to talk about this for a second.
They had a central elevator shaft, which a game connect
very easily like a chimney um and the one the
one single way up or down, was in a stair
(25:00):
case that went around the elevator shaft. So when the
elevator shaft is filled with hot gases and smoke, so
too is the staircase, which meant that when the the
bottom floors starting around the I think the third or
fourth or fifth floor started to catch fire and smoke
started pouring out, it went up and everybody above those
(25:21):
floors was trapped in the hotel up to fifteen floors.
And when the fire department came out, they realized very quickly,
and I'm sure they already knew this. The highest that
they had a ladder, the highest ladder they had could
go up to eighty five ft. Well that's about eight stories.
This is a fifteen story building, So the people in
(25:41):
the higher stories were really in trouble. Yeah, and inside
this hotel too, there was a lot of poor design
going on. They were um there were a lot of
hidden voids, there were false ceilings, There were places where
the fire could be spreading and no one even knows
it's spreading. Again, these and lobbies and mezzanines, open stairways,
(26:02):
the transoms really came into play again with people just
getting fresh air into their rooms, even though they do
mention air conditioning in the wine called foot It was
December Atlanta. Yeah, I'm not sure why either, because I mean,
I can understand why somebody would open the window to
stick their head out. But yeah, since it's cold, their
the transom should be shut. I don't know. Maybe yeah,
(26:25):
maybe the room was stuffy or something like that. Well,
everyone was smoking, so maybe they just wanted to let
out some of their cigarettes smoke, right, or they ran
out of smoke, so they were letting everybody else's smoke in.
It's a good point, uh, is it sure? Okay? Should
we take another break? Yeah? All right, we'll talk about
how most people perished and what was done about this
(26:46):
right after this, So the Wine Cough, Uh, I mean,
(27:18):
in all these hotels, people tried to escape through fire
escapes and stuff because they had them. The Wine Cough
did not have fire escapes, like we said. So there
were a lot of people um tying bed sheets. They
were trying to jump onto net sell by firefighters. They
were trying to leap onto adjacent buildings from lower floors. Uh.
(27:40):
And some people just you know, you you jump because
you think that's your best bet. Uh. And some of
those people actually survived, many of them died. One very
sad story was one person jumped and actually survived because
they landed on bodies of people that had died below them. Yeah,
it's really tough, um to get across. What what the scene?
(28:05):
How chaotic this scene was like there were bodies just
falling everywhere. The firefighters had nets, but people were jumping
in totally uncoordinated ways and so very frequently there are
so many people coming down that they didn't have enough
nets for them all, so they had to basically pick
who to try to catch with their net. Um. There
(28:26):
was a guy named Jimmy Cahill. I believe he was
from Albany, Georgia, and he was a hero of the
Wine Cough fire because he escaped and ran next door
to a building that that shared an alley between it
and the Wine Cough and found like some painters scaffolding,
like just like a stout board and put it between
(28:49):
the building next door that he'd run to and the
room where his mother was trapped on the sixth floor
of the Wine Cough and got her out and started
getting other people out too, and other people, including the
fire department, started laying ladders down and getting people out
these this way. So a lot of people escape from
going from the wine Coughs to the building next door,
but other people even climbing across this ten foot alley
(29:11):
to the next building to safety. We're getting knocked off
of the ladders by people who were jumping from higher buildings.
Like just total chaos, Smoke everywhere, people screaming. Um, just
just chaos, man. I can't whenever, my mind kind of
like imagines what that must have been like it just
kind of snaps back to the present time as quick
(29:33):
as possible. It's just tough to to conceive of. Yeah,
a numbers wise, um man, this is just awful. Forty
eight people were literally burned alive. Uh, forty people were
asphyxiated by smoking fumes. Thirty one people died from jumping
or falling or being knocked off or shoved or whatever.
(29:53):
And uh, that's the total number of what was it
a hundred and nineteen total, And then thirty nine of
those hundred nineteen people were under twenty um and I
think a lot of them were those kids there for
the for the Macha delegation or whatever. Yep, the super
super sad. And you know, the good news is out
of all of this is it's sad that it took this.
(30:16):
But after this spate of fires, the government finally was
like we've got to do something here because people are
just it seems like left and right dying in hotel fires. Yeah,
and um, what's sad is there were people who had
already been writing all of these recommendations of like best practices.
There's a UM, the Life Safety Code from the National
(30:40):
Fire Protection Association had basically been saying like, here's here's
what you gotta do. It's not like we didn't know
how to prevent losses of life and hotel fires. It's
just that people weren't making hotel operators do these things.
And so these fire policies stayed local, right, So those
(31:01):
it's still to this day a patchwork of regulations in
a lot of ways. But there they these little towns
and cities were so affected by these fires in that
they started adopting these policies, including things like you got
a hotel, you've gotta have a fire sprinkler system. That
was one fire alarm system, I mean really low hanging fruit,
(31:23):
but that a lot of hotels just didn't have at
the time. Suddenly they were forced to. Yeah, fire doors
um were required then pretty much everywhere. They were required
to be closed at all times. Uh, those transoms, those
troublesome transoms that admittedly I think are great and love. Um,
they were basically prohibited from that point on, uh, you know,
(31:48):
fresh air, air conditioning or now they said no more transoms. Uh.
And then fire escapes, of course, were mandated pretty much everywhere. Yeah.
And if you if you look around, like if you're
into an office building or something, you ever go down
the stairwell, like it's totally unadorned. It's concrete and metal
and it's painted. There's nothing, there's no are there's no carpet,
there's no fake plants, there's nothing there. And the reason
(32:10):
why is because that stairwell is meant to prevent fire
from getting any further. There's there's nothing to burn. And
a lot of that is because of these ninety six
fires and the changes in the code. It changed like
a fire door, it's a self closing door, it's a
heavy door. It's meant to be that way, and it
says like doors to remain closed at all times. Um.
(32:32):
All of that came out of this, and there used
to be a big debate over whether existing hotels would
be grandfathered in anytime the code was updated. And that
was the custom of the land and again these nineteen
forties six hotel fires changed that. It was if you
have a hotel and you're doing business, you have to
retroactively add a fire sprinkler system. Now. Yeah, and Truman,
(32:54):
President Truman the following year got involved, uh and specifically
called for a national conference on fire pre engine So
while you know, I don't think there were any federal regulations,
like you said, it was still local. Uh. They did. Um,
they did change a lot of the like national and
federal building codes at least, yes, And I think it
(33:16):
is still that way to this day. It's localities that
are responsible for fire codes, right. Yeah. And I think
there's been ever since then an I on design and safety,
whereas back then it was just like let's make this
the most beautiful uh thing. I mean, I think in
that first Chicago fire, didn't they even test the paneling
and found that the oak paneling that they used was
(33:39):
like five times more flammable than just regular oak paneling
because they you know, it was coated with this special
thing to make it look pretty, right, this like the veneer.
I think they used it really really flammable. Absolutely. Um.
There was that that MGM fire in nineteen eighty. That
was so bad. It came decades after these reforms were made.
(34:02):
That was that Vegas. Yeah, it was a big deal.
Like there, it was on TV while it was happening. Um,
there's footage of like people in the higher um floors,
like like hanging out of their window and stuff. Um.
And there are a lot of people in the hotel
at this time. People died. I think seven of those
were hotel employees. Um. But it could have been way,
(34:26):
way worse. But the reason it was as bad as
it was again, A hundred and nineteen is the worst
hotel fired American history. This was eight five, so it
was pretty close to as bad as it gets. But
the reason why it was as bad as it was
just because the people who built the MGM grand like
balked at the cost of adding a sprinkler system when
(34:46):
they built it, and the people in Vegas who were
overseeing the fire code and enforcing it gave him a
pass because they were just glad that the MGM Graham
was building there and the think the fire sprinkler system
would have cost less than two hundred thousand dollars to
build in and they just didn't do it until after Yeah, exactly.
(35:08):
That's yeah, that's what I mean. Like, that's nineteen thirties stuff,
not nineteen eighties stuff. Look right above this, buddy, You
see that little fire sprinkler. Yeah, I know. Now it's
like cool to show your fire sprinklers, you know, and
the piping and all that. Forget your drop ceilings. Yeah,
it's all about open floor plants, which, by the way, Chuck,
(35:29):
I'm seeing more and more like of the the steady
drumbeat against open floor plans is like the worst idea
anyone's ever had as far as office spaces go. Yeah,
how they're just attention killer. It's not like I mean
you know that, like how often do I pester you
and bother you just because I can like lean back
and be like hey right. But they're so distracting, and
(35:53):
I predict they're going to be gone in the next
couple of years. Yeah, I don't know, man, remember like
back to the high key tubes or offices. I think
it's I don't know, I have no prediction. Actually, I
was gonna say, I think it's just gonna be more
working from home, and probably it will, but I don't
think we're done with offices yet. So I don't know
what's coming next. I went in an office building, uh
(36:17):
last week that had those really tall cubes that we
used to be in back in the day, and it
was weird. It was like, Man, I remember, I don't know.
I didn't like it. There was something about someone poking
their head above the wall gophering. Yeah it was. It
was called I think so yeah, I don't know. I
never liked that. I prefer to see my enemies coming,
So I think I like the open thing. Yeah, you did.
(36:40):
Used to be a lot more jumpy with those high
cuber man. I hated him. Uh you got anything else? Yeah?
One more thing? Um, there's a very famous photograph from
the wine Cofugh fire. U That one a young Georgia
Tech student of Pulitzer Prize in ninety seven. He was
a PhD student named Arnold Hardy and uh he was
(37:02):
he lived kind of close by. He was on his
way back from dancing, heard about this fire, called and
found out where it is. Because he fancied himself of
a you know, kind of amateur photographer, grabbed his camera,
took a cab over there and was the first photographer
on the scene and took a very famous photo of
a forty one year old secretary named Daisy mccomber in
(37:23):
mid fall from this building. Um, you know her, her
dress is blown up in her you know, nineteen forties
pantaloons are are showing and it's really a creepy picture. Um.
He ended up selling the rights to the a P
for three hundred bucks. They tried to hire him as
a photographer, you know, their Atlanta guy, and he refused
(37:47):
and um apparently too and this is not well known,
there was a drug store across the street named Lanes
that was closed and they needed supplies like emergency medical supplies,
and people were waiting on the owner to show up
and open it, and Hardy himself kicked in the door. Uh.
Ended up getting arrested for disorderly conduct, but the drug
store dropped the charges, even though they made him pay
(38:09):
for the door, which he paid for with his photo proceeds,
I guess. But as apparently they like, at least in Atlanta,
local police were then required to have medical supplies in
their cars for the first time, and he always felt bad. Um.
I don't know if this is still true, but as
of a couple of years ago, his granddaughter was worked
(38:31):
at Twains indicator, and she kind of kept his memory alive.
He died in two thousand seven and said that he
was always kind of conflicted that he got this recognition
and this Pulitzer prize from such a tragedy. So did
did Daisy die? She lived, although it was hard to
find her because apparently I don't know if it was
because it was you know, her underwear was showing, but
(38:52):
and it was the nineties. She never came out and
was like, that's me. She would deny that it was her,
but they eventually found that it was Daisy mccomber and
she did live. Huh, well, that's good and she lived
at least very interesting. I've got one more thing. So
with the wine Cough Hotel fire, Um, when they showed up,
it was a one alarmed fire when they called, and
(39:14):
I was like, what is that? What does that mean?
And a one alarm fire to alarm fire or whatever.
So apparently the alarm is the number of firefighters and
equipment that are brought out. It's the number of units,
right yeah, or the number of people. And it varies
by municipality. So for example, in like I found in Louisville, Kentucky,
(39:35):
a one alarmed fire is twenty firefighters, five trucks, and
two commanders, and then with each alarm that number doubles. Right,
So when the Atlanta Fire Department showed up on the scene,
it was a one alarmed fire, and it like right
when they got there, the chief turned it into a
two and then three alarmed fire, and then within another
(39:56):
fifteen minutes they turned in a four alarm fire. And
by with I think an hour or so after this
fire had started, they were calling firefighters, um who are
off duty from other cities. Basically anyone who could get
there fast enough and their fire truck came out to
this to fight this fire. Wow, it was a big one.
(40:17):
Uh okay, And that's it. That's all I've got for
hotel fires. I got nothing else. Well, if you want
to know more about hotel fires, you can search those
terms on the internet, because I don't think How Stuff
Works has anything about it. But that's okay because I
said search bar, which means it's time for a listener mail.
Uh this is I'm gonna call this um good job.
(40:43):
That's my monica. Sellis okay. I was listening to how
board breaking works, guys, and you got into conversation on
women's tennis and the shrieking and the yelling and wondering
about stephie Graff or Monica Sellis. You also mentioned Monica
sells Is stabbed. This is where my useless knowledge comes in. Guys,
most women tennis players do shriek, and I would personally
(41:03):
this chuck speaking, I think most men do too, right,
m hmm, I hear a lot of grunting, sure, but
he says, Monica Sellis was the one that really had
a very loud and high shriek, so loud in fact,
that many of her opponents would complain during the match
and she would actually get warnings from the chair umpire. Uh.
They would even measure how loud her shriek was. I
didn't know that. Yeah, that seems weird. Another interesting thing
(41:26):
to me is that when Monica Sellis was stabbed in
the back, she was courtside uh, on the courtside change,
resting in her chair. The person who stabbed her was
not a fan. He was a Steffi Graph fan who
was worried that Sellis would beat her record. Oh my gosh,
I know you believe that. Did you see the movie
about um oh who who? Was it Nancy carry Tanya Harding?
(41:49):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, basically I didn't realize that that
had happened in tennis as well. Did you see that movie? Yeah?
It was good. Huh, it was, it was, It was
very good. I was I was surprised that she human
is Tanya Harding? So well, you know that was local,
locally made. No, that was obviously made in Oregon. No,
like the Golden Buddha Chinese restaurant indicators there. Okay, yeah,
(42:11):
I thought. I was like, is that it's the Golden
Buddha chain because I think I've eaten at that one.
And yeah, okay, you're right. I did notice that, and
we had quite a few of the old stuff. You
should know. Crew members worked on it. Awesome. Yeah, that's cool.
So anyway back to the email, Monica Sellis was very young,
just starting her career off, and Steffi had already been
playing for a while. Monica had been on a terror
and was starting to beat stephie Graff. Because of the
(42:33):
stabbing incident, the Professional Tennis Tour increased security protocol. If
you watch tennis on TV today, you will see that
there are always security on the court during the changeovers.
The security guard actually will stand behind the tennis player
facing the crowd. And that is from Rawle Rodriguez and Topeka, Kansas.
Nice thank you or Raoul r A U L. Rodriguez,
(42:59):
Thank you from Topeka Huh, Topeka, Kansas holding it down well,
thanks a lot, Raoul and everybody out there in Topeka,
Kansas for listening to us, and uh, wherever you are,
you can hang out with us on the social media's
at And by the way, I'm well aware that media
is media's is not the plural of medium. You know
(43:22):
that media is plural itself. I'm just kidding, so lighten up.
Someone said that and I was like, what's a joke, sir. Yeah,
So if you want to hang out with us on
social media's you know, I'm just saying it out of spite. Um,
you can go to stuffy sho dot com find all
that stuff there. You can send us an email to
Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for more
(43:49):
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff works dot com
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