LIFE SENTENCE
EDITOR’S OPINION
“It has been charged that the company had made a practice of keeping the doors locked to prevent tardy employees from slipping in without detection, and to compel all to go out through one door, under scrutiny, to prevent petty theft. How true this is will be ascertained after further investigation. One thing, however, seems to stand out very clearly—that the proprietors of nearly all such factories, in their eagerness to make money, place too small a value on human lives.”
I lifted these words from the March 29, 1911 issue of this publication, then called Fire and Water Engineering. They were written by Frederick W. Shepperd less than a week after the infamous Asch Building (Triangle Shirtwaist) fire in New’ York City that claimed nearly ISO lives. In the wake of the Imperial Food Products tragedy in Hamlet, North Carolina, last month, in which 25 lives were lost and 54 people were injured, Shepperd’s words come back to haunt us.
Preliminary investigative reports indicate that fire spread was rapid and the smoke condition was heavy. But in spite of quickly deteriorating conditions, the workers at Imperial Food Products that day had a chance, slim though it was. Virtually every one of them made it to an exit area under their own power. For many, sadly, the window of opportunity was slammed shut by locked doors.
Too often, it seems, security is seen as a simple, blackand-white problem with a simple, black-and-white solution, as in “Steal my chickens and I lock those doors.” Whether that’s tragic ignorance or an outright disregard for life is a question for case workers, psychologists, and lawyers; regardless, as events transpired in Hamlet, it was the same as passing a death sentence on innocent people.
The imperial tragedy thrust the security vs. life-safety issue into the national spotlight. It is an issue fundamentally grounded in the sociology and psychology of our times. Our fear of crime is much greater than our fear of fire; and on a purely statistical basis, that’s not a groundless comparison. So we put chains around the panic hardware in our schools. We have the windows of our daycare centers welded shut. We trap ourselves in our own homes with burglar bars. We lock up the back doors of our nightclubs and grocery stores and chickenprocessing plants. You name the type of occupancy, and I guarantee somebody someplace is putting chains or bars on it. In our self-protection against the crime threat, whether real or imagined, we are setting an incalculable number of stages for disaster.
What can the fire service do?
I thought about this for quite some time and kept ending up with the same answer.
Since this is essentially a “human” problem, a “human” (as opposed to “engineered”) solution is the logical direction. These obvious approaches—increased fire safety education, a beefed-up fire inspection program, stiffer penalties for noncompliance with the fire code, interaction between fire service organizations and labor unions, greater commitment from local and state political bodies—will improve the situation to some degree.
Unfortunately, even these attempts, for all their necessity and for all the hard work that goes into them, fall short of the mark. They will not change human nature. They will not take the crime-fear out of someone’s heart. They will not erase the urge to protect business and profits by immediate, “cost-effective” measures. They will not change the fact that most people cannot carry “the potential fire” around with them every day; the normal daily worries are hard enough to get through. Shepperd said that “calamities only serve to teach lessons; they do not compel practice.” So it goes. If history is any indication, the tragedy in Hamlet soon will be swallowed up by the textbooks, a lesson that sleeps in our memories, to awaken only when the next death sentence is passed.
And so “the answer”: a full automatic sprinkler/ suppression system designed for the specific fire load, constantly maintained. If this sounds like a broken record, it’s because the message has yet to sink into the very thick collective head of America. With all the talk surrounding the Hamlet tragedy, with all the positive steps taken by agencies in North Carolina, I have not once heard the words “automatic suppression.” Sprinklers won’t unlock doors for you, but they are the key to changing a death sentence to a life sentence.
Let’s hope that in 50 years some editor doesn’t use these w ords to prove the point that we’re just playing the same old record over and over again.
