The doors were locked
A shirt factory burned for half an hour in 1911 and killed 146 people. At the rate on this counter, that is about eleven hours.
This counter is rounded to 120,000 deaths a year. A 2021 Global Burden of Disease analysis put deaths from fire, heat and hot substances at about 117,000, which is the figure the round follows. An older WHO fact sheet still says 180,000. The later number is the one on the card. Most of these deaths are in low- and middle-income countries. The WHO's account, which is the higher and older one, puts almost two thirds of burn deaths in the African and South-East Asian regions, and cites surveys in which 80 to 90% of burns happened at home. Children and women are burned in kitchens. Men are burned at work. The fire in the story was a factory, and it changed a city's law without being the thing this card counts.
Washington Place
On 25 March 1911, near the end of the day, a fire started in scrap cloth under a cutter's table at the Triangle Waist Company, on the upper floors of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, New York City, in the United States. The workers were mostly young women, many of them Italian and Jewish immigrants. The owners, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, got onto the roof and across to the next building. On the ninth floor the Greene Street stairs were on fire. Workers who lived said the door toward Washington Place would not open. The fire escape pulled away from the wall under the people on it. The fire brigade's ladders reached the sixth floor. People jumped. The count of the dead is 146.
Harris and Blanck were indicted for manslaughter. The question the jury had to decide was narrow: that they had known the door was locked, and that the locked door had caused the death of one named worker, Margaret Schwartz. On 27 December 1911 the jury acquitted them. In 1914 the owners settled civil suits at about 75 dollars a life. The locked door was the public fact. The legal guilt was not proved to that jury.
Eleven hours
The factory laws of New York State, in the United States, were rewritten afterwards. Stairs, doors, escapes and hours were inspected because of this fire. That is a real change in one city. The card is a cooking fire in a house, in a country where that commission's rules never arrived. At 120,000 a year, 146 deaths are about eleven hours of the counter. Smoke that kills slowly, over years, is a different story, told in Five days of coal smoke. A poison that is swallowed or breathed, rather than burned, is the next card.
This is not safety advice. It is a story about a population statistic. It says nothing about any one person's risk in a fire.
Sources
- The US Census Bureau's account of the fire, including the date and the 146 dead.
- Cornell's Triangle Fire archive on the trial, the acquittal, and the later civil settlement.
- A 2021 Global Burden of Disease analysis of fire, heat and hot substances, about 117,000 deaths.
- The WHO burns fact sheet, the older estimate of about 180,000 deaths a year.
- The annual figure used on the counter is the Ledger's own rounding, set out on the methodology page.