Fire Engineering Staff
Content By Fire Engineering Staff - Page 3339
THE LESSON OF THE SLOCUM CALAMITY.
The burning of the excursion steamboat, General Slocum, when crowded with women and children, on pleasure bent, seems almost criminal in its nature. Over goo lives sacrificed, through negligence to observe even the most ordinary precautions, calls for a radical revision in the methods governing the inspection of passenger boats, especially those which are used to convey large numbers of persons about the various harbors and rivers in the summer season.
THE SLOCUM HORROR.
The trouble about the Slocum horror is that, as matters stand at present, New York city is absolutely powerless to protect her own citizens against such disasters. The licensing and inspection of excursion boats is altogether in the hands of the Federal government as is, also, that of pilots and all such higher officers as do business in the harbor. Why this should be so is due, I suppose, to a desire on the part of the Federal government to avoiding clash in jurisdiction, so far as concerns rivers and harbors and navigable streams, and so to diminish the chances of evils arising from a divided authority.
THE BALTIMORE CONFLAGRATION
A correspondent of FIRE AND WATER ENGINEERING who was present at last week’s conflagration in Baltimore, and was an eye-witness of the fire from almost the beginning to the end, gives some interesting details of that terrible disaster. He states that the building in which the fire started was equipped with an automatic fire alarm system, and, notwithstanding that fact, the fire must have been under way for fully fifteen minutes before the firemen received the alarm.
THE CLEVELAND WATER TUNNEL.
The new tunnel from lake Erie, which is to supply Cleveland, Ohio, with water, has been completed, and, as soon as the new pumping station has been finished, the city will be furnished with water from a steel-crib located three and one-halt miles from the nearest shore point and about five miles obliquely from the new Kirtland street pumping station. Between that station and the intake the tunnel has been constructed—a distance of 26,000 feet.
HOBOKEN’S DOUBLE HOLOCAUST.
THROUGHOUT the length and breadth of the civilized world the telegraph wires have long since spread the news of the awful disaster of Saturday last, which desolated the waterfront of Hoboken and made a clean sweep of the piers, wharves, and freightsheds of the North German Lloyd, the Hamburg-American, and the Thingvalla lines, taking off in its course the Campbell stores, which were located immediately north of the offices of the last-named line.
NEW YORK’S LATEST HOLOCAUST.
ONCE again the Bowery lodginghouse has come to the front as a firetrap, and the city’s list of victims who have met their death by fire has been swelled by seven lives, all of which might have been saved had the proper precautions been taken by those who are charged with the responsibility of seeing that the building was sufficiently protected against fire and sufficiently equipped with means of escape from the flames when once they had started.