50-years-ago: Lessons learned from tragedy. A look back at Our Lady of the Angels school fire.

Nov 28, 2008

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This weekend people will gather in Chicago to pray and remember the victims of a tragic fire that struck the city 50-years-ago on Monday. Ninety-two children and three nuns died in a fire that broke out in a stairwell during that last hour of classes at Our Lady of the Angels school on December 1, 1958. The impact of this fire was felt across the country and the world. It had a great influence on the building codes and safety features and procedures that we now take for granted in schools and other public assembly buildings.

Some of the many factors that contributed to this large loss of life included a delayed alarm due to nuns who didn’t have authority to pull the fire alarm after discovering the fire, open stairwells and a lack of exit capacity. The fire started in the 1910 built north wing of the school. It had been “grandfathered” due to being constructed before 1949 code changes that addressed stairwell and exit issues. For some reason, a 1953 school annex also had open stairwells.

I first became interested in the tragedy in the 1970s thanks to an article written for Argosy magazine by Hal Bruno (I hope to have that scanned for posting on Monday’s anniversary). There is a lot of other information, along with pictures and videos, available on the Internet about this fire.

Here some links worth checking out.

Watch part of a documentary on human behavior in fires that includes film of the fire, an interview with a firefighter and a survivor

Promo for WTTW-TV documentary, Angels Too Soon, has more film from the fire

List of CFD companies that responded to the fire

Coroner’s jury findings

Commissioner Robert J. Quinn’s January, 1959 article in Fire Engineering

NFPA Quarterly Report, January, 1959

Website OLA.com with links to archival material (****this site has a substanial amount of information about the fire, including diagrams, reports and pictures****)

Journey keyboardist is one of the survivors of the fire

Historical perspective on school fires from Thomas Cunningham at WithTheCommand.com