$3 Million Fire in Store Beauty Shop Shows Hazard of Cosmetic Chemicals
Features
Exotic hair styling in today’s beauty salon involves some exotic chemistry. The tinting, frosting, and waveset spraying use strong oxidizing agents, sometimes in contact with organic hydrocarbons, which can present a serious fire hazard. Racine, Wis., investigators now believe this was the cause of a $3 million shopping center blaze on April 18—the city’s largest loss in nearly a century.
The 24-acre Elmwood Plaza center was completed in 1957. That was a decade before code changes required sprinklers throughout such occupancies. A few heads were provided, as in boiler rooms, but otherwise the only built-in protection was a supervised rate-of-rise heat detector system throughout Goldblatt’s Department Store, the center’s largest tenant with 45,000 square feet on the street floor. Opening off Goldblatt’s rear loading dock area were several storage or work rooms containing high fire loads. The store’s beauty salon also bordered those rooms.
Around 6:30 p.m. last April 18, an hour after the beauty salon had closed for the day, a Goldblatt’s customer reported to a stockboy that there seemed to be a fire in the vicinity of the furniture refinishing room. Investigating, the boy and a retail clerk looked above the 6-foot partitions and saw flames washing against the ceiling of that room. They used an extinguisher only briefly before flashover drove them out. The boy was slightly burned.
Almost at once, as another customer recalled, “the fire blowtorched out at us through the cafe doors” at the aisle leading from the work area to the sales floor.
Second alarm requested
All store occupants were safely evacuated. At 6:39 p.m., a heat detector alarm reached the Racine Fire Department. Engines 9,7, and 6, Truck 2 and Rescue 1 responded with Assistant Chief Art Schuppe. When Engine 9 arrived at Goldblatt’s front doors from only three blocks away, the officer could see pitch-black smoke banked down to eye level beneath the 20-foot ceiling. He radioed immediately for a second alarm while other first-in companies went around to the rear of the store where employees reported the seat of the fire was located.
Once flames had involved the large amount of flammable liquid in the furniture refinishing room, some of it in open cans with pouring spouts, the blaze mushroomed through or over wooden partitions into the shoe storage area. Wooden shelves there held 5000 pairs, many of them tennis shoes, in cartons piled almost to the ceiling. Fire was spreading into the pricing room containing incoming clothing and other goods being put into inventory.
“We made an aggressive interior attack,” Chief Ron Chiapete declared later, “but it was like fighting an aboveground fire in a basement tire factory.”
Added Assistant Chief Frank Reisenauer, “When I got there, the smoke was down to 2 feet off the floor. You could crawl under it, but every time we hit a hot spot with a line, the turbulence backed us out. It was unbelievably hot.”
Outside aid used
Additional alarms and special calls for out-of-town help over the next couple of hours brought all 12 pieces of Racine apparatus to the scene plus units from Sturtevant, Mount Pleasant, Kansasville, Caledonia and Kenosha. Some outside companies manned Racine stations, others worked at the fire, while a few were kept busy shuttling air bottles, nearly 400 of which were needed throughout the 4½-hour fight by 110 men to control the blaze. Nine fire fighters were hurt.
There are no openings in Goldblatt’s exterior walls (17 inches of block and brick) except the main entrances, loading dock doors and a few show windows. The roof is either precast or poured concrete on a steel deck. To get better access to the fire, as well as to improve ventilation, Racine Truck Co. 2 used a battering ram to breach the rear wall in three places, with only limited effectiveness.
Fire fighters sawed six holes through the roof.
However, as Reisenauer pointed out, “This didn’t do too much good either. There was a dropped ceiling way below the roof deck, and we couldn’t get enough draft to pull the smoke up and out from beneath that.”
Thus, although flames were confined to a relatively small section of the store’s street floor, with little structural damage, smoke and water loss was severe throughout. Despite absence of wall openings into adjoining stores, smoke entered several of those through rooftop air intakes, causing damage to 12 other firms besides Goldblatt’s (several of them apparel shops). The result was Racine’s largest fire loss since the downtown conflagration of 1882.
Fire origin in towel bin
Investigation by the fire prevention bureau showed that the fire started sometime after 4:15 p.m. in a 3 X 4-foot plywood storage bin in the rear of the beauty salon. Heavy charring down to the sills, plus burn patterns in the bin itself, confirmed the point of origin. Melted glass comb containers nearby, unstained by carbon deposits, indicated 1200 to 1500-degree heat.
It was in this bin that the salon’s soiled 15 X 20-inch cotton terrycloth towels were collected until the weekly Friday morning pickup by a towel cleaning service. Towels were brought from the shop’s seven work stations in hamper bags, cinched shut when full by a drawstring. Easter (the Sunday before the fire) marked a busy season, and even a normal week required an estimated 400 to 600 towels, which were draped over a customer’s shoulders during permanent waves or used to pat curls dry after various preparations had been applied to the hair—thus becoming impregnated with a variety of chemicals.
Racine Fire Department photo
The last towel pickup had been Good Friday, April 13, so by the following Wednesday, several bags totaling 350 to 400 towels were in the bin. Bin walls reached 6 feet off the floor. A wire mesh enclosure extended from there to the ceiling. An exhaust vent duct was located there and one of the heat detectors was 2 1/2 feet above that duct. The back wall of the bin adjoined a floor-to-ceiling partition of 1/4 -inch plywood on both sides of wood studding.
The growing fire soon burned through this. Directly on the other side of it, in the furniture refinishing room, a storage cabinet held numerous gallon containers of ethyl acetate, methyl isobutyl ketone and other highly flammable liquids used to touch up surface blemishes on display items. More such containers were stored on shelves or beneath a workbench. As in the towel bin, other partitions surrounding the room went only part way to the ceiling, the rest being wire mesh.
Declared Lieutenant Bill Jones of the bureau, “We’d had fires in beauty shop towels before, but we didn’t think anything of it. This time, once we were satisfied that the fire had started in that towel bin and not on the furniture shop side, we dug into it further.
Chemical hazard defined
“Several cosmetic chemists we contacted told us that a common ingredient in permanent wave solutions is thioglycolic acid. The hair tinting or frosting operations widely used today also involving bleaching chemicals. These often include what they call an ‘oxygenator’ or ‘oxygen energizer’ which sometimes is mixed with hydrogen peroxide for use. A common agent is sodium bromate.
“A local chemist with a background in cosmetology has assured us that thioglycolic acid is extremely reactive with sodium bromate,” Jones continued. “So if these ingredients get together, especially soaked in cotton toweling, an exothermic reaction can result—in other words, spontaneous combustion. We think that is what started our fire. A discarded cigarette isn’t likely because the towels are too damp when they go in the bags.”
Jones believes several factors combined to prevent discovery of the smoldering blaze before the beauty salon closed that day. First, the exhaust vent above the towel bin probably sucked out combustion products for some time. Second, the salon storage area had no false ceiling, but the working area did. Smoke beginning to gather above that ceiling would not have been noticed. Third, as Jones pointed out, “the predominant odor in a beauty salon is that of ammonia. Operators we talked to say they feel their sense of smell is inhibited by that, so it’s unlikely they would have smelled a slight amount of smoke.” Finally, the heat detector was so positioned that operation of the exhaust vent would have prevented heat reaching it until too late.
Salon inspector’s opinion
“As we dug into this more and more,” Jones continued, “We went to the American Beauty College here to inquire about the dangers of these chemicals. They suggested we talk to the State Board of Cosmetology. These people have a staff of inspectors who check on beauty shop operations and they sent one to talk to us.
“She had eight years of shop experience herself, besides several more as a regional inspector, and said she was sincerely interested in beauticians getting more basic chemistry knowledge. She had worked with a Carroll College chemistry professor in Waukesha, Wis., to develop a teaching program for these people. He couldn’t find material, so he wrote his own. His first question to his first class was, ‘Do you realize that you use the most hazardous chemicals of any profession but have the least knowledge of their use?”’
Because the present Wisconsin law administered by the state board is concerned mostly with beauty shop sanitation, Jones has requested an appearance before the board to present evidence from the Elmwood Plaza fire in support of rule changes to require used towels be stored in suitable metal containers. Local ordinance changes are also being sought.
Many small shops avoid the storage problem because they wash towels every day or two, but the bigger places use towel services with weekly pickups. However, towels are not the only hazard.
—Racine Fire Department photo.
Flammable in bulk
“Liquid hair spray is now supplied in bulk,” explained Jones. “The stuff comes in gallon jugs made of plastic, to be applied by spray or pump guns on the premises. No-smoking rules were established several years ago because of the flammability of this spray, which typically is 70 percent isopropyl or ethyl alcohol to promote rapid drying of the hair. Now, we are faced with bulk storage of the material which used to come in aerosol cans. If it were to be kept on the furniture shop side of the partition in Goldblatt’s, it would have to be in a metal paint locker, but on the beauty salon side, it can be kept anyplace.”
Added Jones, “Many insurance company investigators have agreed with our findings so far. We also contacted other fire departments. The director of Chicago’s fire prevention bureau has told us that in poorly ventilated areas, like the bottom of this bin, we could definitely expect exothermic reaction from these materials in cotton towels.
“Greendale, Wis., reported two similar beauty shop fires in 1975 and 1976. We learned that they sent samples of toweling to the state crime lab for analysis and that traces of thioglycolic acid were found.
“Although the different brands come in different strengths and mixes, the basic ingredients tend to be the same,” Jones explained. “We took some samples to a chemist at the Gateway Technical Institute here for experimentation. He mixed the wave solution ingredients in a beaker, then covered them for 24 hours. When he removed the cover and passed a flame over the mouth of the beaker, he got a slight explosion plus acceleration of the flame. His report concluded that some sort of flammable gas was generated by the mixture. Nevertheless, none of the packages gave any fire hazard warning. Some do not even list the ingredients.”
Investigation is continuing, involving Racine’s Health Department as well as other agencies. The Food and Drug Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission have been contacted.
Meanwhile, with the widespread use of new preparations, the “cream relaxers” and “neutralizing shampoos” containing cetyl alcohol, propylene glycol, or hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, changing hair styles may turn out to be the hottest thing in town—in more ways than one.
