Our Lady of the Angels School fire
On Monday, December 1, 1958, a fire broke out at Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago, Illinois, shortly before classes were to be dismissed for the day. The fire originated in the basement near the foot of a stairway. The elementary school was operated by the Archdiocese of Chicago and had an enrollment of approximately 1,600 students. A total of 92 pupils and three nuns ultimately died when smoke, heat, fire, and toxic gases cut off their normal means of escape through corridors and stairways. Many more were injured when they jumped from second-floor windows which, because the building had a raised basement, were nearly as high above ground as a third floor would be on level ground, approximately.
The disaster was the lead headline story in American, European, and Canadian newspapers. Pope John XXIII sent his condolences from The Vatican. The severity of the fire shocked the nation and surprised educational administrators of both public and private schools. The disaster led to major improvements in standards for school design and fire safety codes.
Background
Our Lady of the Angels was a grammar school comprising kindergarten through eighth-grade education. It was located at 909 North Avers Avenue in the Humboldt Park area of Chicago's West Side, on the northeast corner of West Iowa Street and North Avers Avenue. The neighborhood had originally been heavily Irish-American, but gradually developed in the first half of the twentieth century into a largely Italian-American middle-class community. The area was also home to several other first, second, and third-generation immigrant groups, including German Americans, Polish Americans and other Slavic Americans. Most of the families in the immediate neighborhood were Catholic.The school was one of several buildings associated with the large Catholic parish; others included a church, a rectory, which was adjacent to the church, a convent of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was across Iowa Street from the school, and two buildings one block east on Hamlin Avenue referred to by the parish as Joseph Hall and Mary Hall respectively, which housed kindergarten and first-grade classes. The Hamlin Avenue buildings were not involved in the fire, and aside from some minor smoke inhalation problems, neither were the first floor of the north wing, the entire south wing, or the annex.
The fire was primarily confined to the second floor of the north wing. The north wing was part of a two-story structure built in 1910, but remodeled several times over the years. That wing originally consisted of a first-floor church and a second-floor school. The entire building became a school when a new, much larger church was opened in 1939.
Fire prevention and hazards
Due to a grandfather clause that did not require schools to retrofit to a new standard if they already met previous regulations, the school legally complied with the State of Illinois and City of Chicago fire codes of 1958 and was generally clean and well-maintained; nonetheless, several fire hazards existed. Each classroom door had a glass transom above it, which provided ventilation into the corridor but also permitted flames and smoke to enter once heat broke the glass. The school had one fire escape. The building had no automatic fire alarm, no rate-of-rise heat detectors, no direct alarm connection to the fire department, no fire-resistant stairwells, and no heavy-duty fire doors from the stairwells to the second-floor corridor. At the time, fire sprinklers were primarily found in factories or in new school construction, and modern smoke detectors did not become commercially available until 1969.In keeping with city fire codes, the building had a brick exterior to prevent fires from spreading from building to building as in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. However, its interior was made almost entirely of combustible wooden materials—stairs, walls, floors, doors, roof, and cellulose fiber ceiling tiles. Moreover, the floors had been coated many times with both flammable varnish and petroleum-based waxes. There were only two fire alarm switches in the entire school, and they were both in the south wing. There were four fire extinguishers in the north wing, each mounted off the floor, out of reach for many adults and all of the children.
The single fire escape was near one end of the north wing, but reaching it required passing through the main corridor, which in this case rapidly became filled with suffocating smoke and superheated gases. Students hung their flammable winter coats on hooks in the hallway. There were no limits to the number of students in a single classroom, and because of the post-World War II baby boom this number sometimes reached as many as 64 students. The school did not have a fire alarm box outside on the sidewalk, the nearest one being a block and a half away. With its ceilings and a basement that extended partially above ground level, the school's second-floor windows were above the ground, making jumping from them extremely risky, exacerbated by the fact that the grade surface under all windows was concrete or crushed rock.
The fire
Outbreak and reaction
The fire began in the basement of the older north wing between about 2:00 p.m. and 2:20 p.m. CST. Classes were due to be dismissed at 3:00 p.m. Ignition took place in a cardboard trash barrel located a few feet from the northeast stairwell. The fire smoldered undetected for approximately 20 minutes, gradually heating the stairwell and filling it with a light gray smoke that later would become thick and black, as other combustibles became involved. At the same time, it began sending superheated air and gases into an open pipe chase very near the source of the fire. The pipe chase made an uninterrupted conduit up to the cockloft above the second-floor classrooms.The smoke began to fill the second-floor corridor, but remained unnoticed for a few minutes. At approximately 2:25 p.m., three eighth-grade girls, Janet Delaria, Frances Guzaldo, and Karen Hobik, returning from an errand, came up a different staircase to return to their second-floor classroom in the north wing. The girls encountered thick grayish smoke, making them cough loudly. They hurriedly entered the rear door of Room 211 and notified their teacher, Sister Mary Helaine O'Neill.
O'Neill got up from her desk and began lining up her students to evacuate the building. When she opened the front door of the classroom moments later to enter the hallway, the intensity of the smoke caused O'Neill to deem it too dangerous to attempt escape down the stairs leading to Avers Avenue on the west side of the building. She remained inside the classroom with her students to await rescue. The fire continued to strengthen, and several more minutes elapsed before the school's fire alarm rang.
About this same time, a window at the foot of the stairwell shattered due to the intense heat, giving the smoldering fire a new oxygen supply. This burst of heat also ignited a roll of material, described by the fire chief in his report as "tarred building paper", stored in the area, which, along with the petroleum-based waxes on the floors, caused the thick, oily black smoke that was believed responsible for so many of the smoke inhalation deaths in the building. The wooden staircase burst into flames and, acting like a chimney, sent hot gases, fire, and very thick, black smoke swirling up the stairwell.
At approximately the same time, the school janitor, James Raymond, saw a red glow through a window while walking by the building. After running to the basement furnace room, he viewed the fire through a door that led into the stairwell. After instructing two boys who were emptying trash baskets in the boiler room to leave the area, Raymond rushed to the rectory and asked the housekeeper to call the fire department. He then ran back to the school to begin evacuation via the fire escape. The two boys meanwhile returned to their class and warned their lay teacher, which prompted her and another teacher to lead their students out of classrooms in the annex area of the second floor. The teachers had looked in vain for the school principal before deciding to act on their own to vacate the school. Unknown to them, the principal was in the other wing, covering a class for an absent teacher.
As they left the building, a teacher pulled the fire alarm, but it did not ring. Several minutes later, after leaving her students in the church, she returned to the school and attempted to activate the alarm again. This time, the alarm rang inside the school, but it was not automatically connected to the fire department. By this time, however, the students and teachers in the north wing classrooms on the second floor were essentially trapped, whether they knew about the fire or not.
Despite Raymond's visit to the rectory soon after 2:30 p.m. to spread the alert, there was an unexplained delay before the first telephone call from the rectory reached the fire department at 2:42 p.m. One minute later, a second telephone call was received from Barbara Glowacki, the owner of a candy store on the alley along the north wing. Glowacki had noticed flames in the northeast stairwell after a passing motorist, Elmer Barkhaus, entered her store and asked if a public telephone was available to call the fire department. Police initially thought this 61-year-old man was a suspect in the blaze until Barkhaus voluntarily came forward and explained himself. Glowacki used her private telephone in her apartment behind the store to notify authorities.
Evacuation
The first-floor landing was equipped with a heavy wooden door, which effectively blocked the fire and heat from entering the first floor hallways. However, the northeast stairwell landing on the second floor had no fire blocking door. As a result, there was no barrier to prevent the spread of fire, smoke, and heat through the second floor hallways. The western stairwell landing on the second floor had two substandard corridor doors with glass panes propped open at the time of the fire. This caused further drafts of air and an additional oxygen supply to feed the flames. Two other doors were chained open when they should have been closed; these doors were at the first and second floor levels leading into the annex. The upper door was quickly closed, but the lower one remained open throughout the fire.As the fire consumed the northeast stairway, a pipe chase running from the basement to the cockloft above the second floor false ceiling had been feeding superheated gases for some minutes on a direct route to the attic. The building's old roof had been re-coated numerous times, and the tar had become very thick. Consequently, the heat of the fire was not able to burn quickly through the roof. If it had, it would have opened a hole that would have served to vent much of the smoke and gases. Eventually, as the temperature continued to rise in the enclosed space, the wood of the cockloft itself flashed over.
The fire then swept down through the hallway ceiling's ventilation grates into the second floor corridor as it flashed through the cockloft above the classrooms. Glass transom windows above the doors of each classroom broke as the heat intensified, allowing superheated gases and thick black smoke in the hallway to enter the classrooms. By the time the students and their teachers in the second floor classrooms realized the danger, their sole escape route into the hallway was impassable. The second floor of the north wing had become an impervious fire trap.
For 329 children and five teaching nuns, the only remaining means of escape was to jump from the second floor windows to the concrete or crushed rock below, or to wait for the fire department to rescue them. Recognizing the trap they were in, some of the nuns encouraged the children to sit at their desks or gather in a semicircle and pray. But smoke, heat, and flames quickly forced them to the windows.
One nun, Sister Mary Davidis Devine, ordered her students in room 209 to place books and furniture in front of her classroom doors, and this helped to slow the entry of smoke and flames until rescuers arrived. Out of the 55 students in the room, most escaped unharmed, eight escaped with injuries and two died; Beverly Burda, the last student remaining in the room, evidently passed out from smoke inhalation and died when the roof collapsed. Another student, Valerie Thoma, died at a hospital three months later, on March 5, 1959, as a result of her extensive burn injuries.