The Deadly Cost of Ignoring Fire Safety
Tragedy strikes a Seattle boarding house as terrified residents leap from windows, exposing the city's lack of building safety regulations.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A disaster occurred at a boarding house at the corner of Third and Seneca Streets, where a fire broke out due to the explosion of a stand lamp. When the fire began, the guests had just gone to sleep. By the time the watchman returned to the room, it was filled with smoke. Many guests, panicked by fear, jumped from the third floor to the pavement below, sustaining fatal injuries. F. A. Coose, a resident, managed to save his family, but the firemen reported the structure was a 'firetrap.' Because the building was only three stories high, the law did not compel owners to install fire escapes—a regulatory loophole that accounts for the loss of life.
“The firemen say the place was the worst kind of a firetrap. Owing to the fact that it was but three stories high the law did not compel the owners to put fire escapes on the building.”
This 1892 report on the lack of fire escapes in low-rise boarding houses reflects the ongoing tension in Seattle between housing affordability and life-safety building codes. Today’s debates over retrofitting older apartment buildings often center on the same friction between the cost of compliance for owners and the safety of tenants.
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