1/17/2024 0 Comments Great chicago fire![]() The tragedy was exasperated by the failure of the U.S. With the exits blocked, girls attempted to use the rusted fire escape or jump from windows into the fire department’s dry-rotted nets, only to plunge onto the pavement in front of bystanders below. Fabric scraps, oil and hot machines crammed into rooms on the upper floors of the ten-story building quickly unleashed an inferno within the building. The factory’s management responded by locking the workers into the building. The garment workers at the company had been attempting to unionize to gain better wages and improved working conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company’s fire resulted in the tragic loss of nearly 150 young women and girls on March 25, 1911, in New York City. O’Leary’s Cow, arguing that the blue flames some firemen reported seeing were likely from burning natural gas, not extraterrestrial gases, as theorized by the comet camp. Bales debunks this theory in his book, The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. Some have suggested that pieces of Biela’s Comet-a periodic comet that apparently disintegrated around the time of the fire-might have fallen to Earth and sparked not only the Chicago fire but other devastating blazes in Wisconsin and Michigan that same year. “He discarded it and hobbled to safety by clinging to the cow.” An amateur historian, Richard Bales, found enough evidence pointing to Daniel “Peg Leg” Sullivan-including inconsistencies in Sullivan’s story about what happened that night-that a Chicago City Council committee officially exonerated O’Leary in 1997.Ī comet. “As he tried to flee, his peg leg stuck in a floor crack,” TIME recounts. O’Leary’s one-legged neighbor, who was allegedly having a nightcap in the barn when a spark from his pipe ignited the hay. As TIME reported in 1971, this alternate account featured Mrs. A century after the fire, officials turned their attention to a different suspect (although the cow still played a supporting role). However, as an Irish immigrant living in poverty, she made a convenient scapegoat-and reporters seized on the fire’s great irony: Although it decimated Chicago’s downtown, wiping out the central business district and charring the courthouse, the blaze that began in her barn somehow spared O’Leary’s meager cottage. According to the Chicago Tribune, O’Leary herself consistently denied this account, saying that she never milked after dark. As the popular story went, O’Leary was in the barn around 9 p.m., milking her cow, when the cow kicked over a lantern and sparked the inferno. How it started is the question, although throughout her life, O’Leary suffered the condemnation of a city that blamed her for it. That the fire started in the barn behind Catherine O’Leary’s West Side cottage is certain. To this day, no one knows for sure which, if any, is to blame. The debate has featured a rotating cast of colorful (possible) culprits, but every explanation has its doubters. But for nearly a century and a half, questions have lingered over who-or what-actually started the fire on this day, Oct. It leveled more than 3 square miles of the city, killing 300 people and leaving another 100,000 homeless. Without a doubt, the Great Chicago Fire was one of the worst disasters of the 19th century.
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