The Elk County advocate. [volume] (Ridgway, Pa.) 1868-1883, 1875-03-04
HOUSES ON FIRE.
Few Hints for those who Lose their
Presence of Mind ut n Fire.


Few Hints for those who Lose their
Presence of Mind ut u Fire.
The burning of tenement-house in
this city, says the New York Times,
furnished striking example of the man
ner in which ordinarily courageous peo-
pie lose all their presence of mind when
in danger of death by fire. We have
all heard the story of the woman who,
finding herself cut off from hope of es-
cape from house in flames, threw her
baby out of fourth story window, and
carefully lowered the pet kitten to the
ground with rope made of blankets.
1t is recorded also that Clergyman in
country town, awaking in the middle of
the night to find his church half burned
down, risked his life in heroic efforts to
save the lightning rod, quite forgetting
that there was much more valuable prop
erty to be extricated from the general
ruin. When the great fires occurred in
Chicago and Boston, hundreds of per-
! sons seemed so completely to lose control
of their senses that they would have
rushed into the flames had they not been
kept back. The "night of fires" in
Paris in 1871, when the torch of the in
cendiary was applied in a hundred
streets at once, drove many persons out
of their senses. The horrors of the ter
rible catastrophe of Fall River, still fresh
in the minds of our readers, were largely
due to the temporary madness which fell
upon the operatives who, in their haste
to escape from what they feared was one
impending death, rushed headlong upon
another. People who would display
great firmness and bravery in the midst
of peril by water, or amid the terrors of
a railroad accident, are powerless to save
even themselves, not to speak of others,
in presence of flames.
In the recent disaster in this CITY, two
children lost their lives by suffocation.
Their father and mother, with third
child, occupying an adjoining room,
awoke to find everything enveloped in
smoke, and at once ran out of doors. A
moments reflection would have CON
vinced the hapless father that he should
have aroused the other children, and that
all should have left the house together
But he seems to have lost all recollection
of them until he had been in the street
for some time, when, suddenly aroused
to sense of their danger, he bravely
rushed into the flames in search of them.
His efforts to reach them were vain, and
he would have lost his own life had not
the policemen and tiremen taken cour-
ageous risks in going after him, and
dragging him back to the fresh air. All
other occupants of the house, on the
floors above this unfortunate family,
were saved, although they did not awake
until almost surrounded by the flames,
which burst up through the planks be-
meath them. While the fire was in pro-
gress, half dressed people, who had
escaped, refused to take shelter, despite
the intense cold, and were with the
greatest difficulty restrained from rush
ila iIito IA. JA..Vi,o me, aii,. IuIocI i,-
bly, perishing there. The same lack of
presence of mind, the same apparent in
sanity when danger is near, was displayed
at the burning of the weaving factory in
Brooklyn. Fire, which broke out among
a quantity of waste jute in the cellar of
the factory, spread rapidly to the upper
stsries, cutting of, flight by the stair
ways for some seventy work girls. A
panic ensued, and there was danger of
repetition of the Fall River calamity,
when some one discovered that escape
was possible by jumping to the roof of
an extension, which was not more than
six feet from the windows Of the second
story.
Even this easy means of exit did not
serve, however, to lessen the panic, and
many of the girls were severely cut and
bruised in their frantic efforts to get out
at the windows. Those who remained
calm and obeyed the fremen were res
cued without the slightest injuries.
An ounce of prevention is, of course,
worth a pound of cure, and it would
naturally be much wiser to avoid reck-
lessness in heating houses, even when
the weather is unusually cold, than to
drill for action in case of a sudden ca
lamity. The large number of destruc-
tive fires during the past few days has
doubtless been in some measure due to
the cold weather. Overheated stoves
placed too near thin and combustible
walls, are the causes of many so-called
mysterious conhagrations. 1t is i'm
possible to secure proper caution among
the numerous inmates of crowded tene-
ment houses, or great blocks in which
various shops and factories are situated.
The "trial by fire" is one which may
come to all with hardly a moments
warming, and which demands coolness
and instant action. The chances are in
at least ninety cases in one hundred in
favor of the escape of those who are in
a burning building, if they do not fran
tically rush into, rather than away from,
the danger.