The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1900-07-07
A COSTLY LESSON.


there been such a disastrous conHagra-
ton in America as that of the recent
Hoboken affair.
Here was a vast commercial plant
consisting of four great ocean steamers,
the piers at which they were moored
and freight buildings In and about this
plant there were fully one thousand
men. The property in their charge was
of many millions value.
Water was there in floods, yet these
costly structures fell a swift sacrifice
to the all devouring flames. The himsy
character and the highly imf1ammable
nature of the stored goods and lack of
apparatus were the chief elements in
one OF the greatest disasters of the
maritime annals of the country.
Under ordinary conditions it would
reasonably be supposed that all of this
property and human lives would be as
safe at the wharf as anywhere in the
city of Hoboken. But it was not so.
Whatever precautions had been taken
by the company for the safety of this
vast property it proved of little avail at
the crucial test.
But lesson has come from this sad
affair. 1t has taught capital the folly
of building finder box piers. The dry
pany could not have well burned better
if a fireworks man had built them for a
pyrotechnic display. Within a few mo-
ments the fire had all the piers in it's
deadly embrace as closely as if the fire
had started in so places at once by pre-
arrangement.
The finder box piers were crowded to
the roof with merchandise of the most
infiammable sort. There were bales and
bales of cotton: barrels of spirits, paints
and explosives 1t was as If someone
had built a big bonfire that needed but
a match to touch it off.
Then came the cigarette, or the cigar
stump, or the smouldering tobacco,
emptied from a pipe. 1t only required
one spark to kindle that 100000 bon
fire and kill and MAIN and torture hum
dreds of helpless, wretched beings. There
was the bonfire, then came the firetrap.
1t was case of stupidity to say the
least-the criminal carelessness of those
who build such finder box piers. 1t does
not seem to be the North German Lloyd
line, alone. that houses its freight in
sheds, constructed to burn. 1t is the
New York custom-a custom never I'M
derstood in Europe-where freight sheds
are of stone, steel and slate, as they
SnOuiu De.
A truly horrible point about the fire
was the murderous behavior of tugboat
captains, who. with an eye to salvage
alone-the money they would get for
saving property-let countless men and
women burn and drown.
Were after the salvage" the brutal
captains said. There is no salvage on
human life"
1t will not be reassuring to the public
to be asked to believe that steel steam
ships lying at the wharf are a source of
greater danger to those in and about
them than the same vessels travelling
the ocean, and that the skill, care and
foresight that can protect one of them
on the bosom Of the waters, are helpless,
when she is moored at her dock.
What the travelling public will crave
and what it is entitled to have, is a ra-
tiona1 account of what has happened in
the immediate past and such guarantees
for the future as the facts seem to call
for. Every great fire has its moral.
Non-combustib1e wharves would seem
to be one obvious lesson of this calamity.