A Perilous Plunge Aboard the City of Panama
An elderly passenger’s fall through an unsecured hatchway exposes the dangerous negligence of a bustling Seattle steamship.
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.
Mrs. Phelps, the mother-in-law of Hon. J. B. Montgomer, who had engaged passage on the City of Panama for San Francisco, met with a severe and dangerous accident on board that boat last evening about 9 o’clock. While walking around the saloon, she crossed over a covered hatchway and went into her stateroom. In four or five minutes, she left her room and started to cross the same hatchway, not noticing that in the interval the covering had been taken off, and she fell through into the lower hold, a distance of about 20 feet. She alighted on some pelts which in a manner deadened her fall, or she would undoubtedly have been killed. Her right arm was doubled under her as she fell and sustained a compound fracture, the bone above the elbow being badly splintered for two inches and the joint completely crushed. Mrs. Phelps is an elderly lady, large and heavy, weighing considerably over two hundred pounds, and it is wonderful that the fall did not more seriously injure her. She was taken to the residence of Mr. M. A. Kelly and Drs. Calhoun and Baker summoned. They extracted from the arm a number of pieces of splintered bone, one of them nearly an inch in length, and set the arm. It was certainly a piece of reprehensible carelessness to leave a hatch open in the main saloon of a steamer crowded with passengers without having any one left in charge of it.
“It was certainly a piece of reprehensible carelessness to leave a hatch open in the main saloon of a steamer crowded with passengers.”
Travel safety remains a persistent civic issue in Seattle, moving from the unregulated decks of 19th-century steamships to modern debates over transit security and infrastructure maintenance. The 'reprehensible carelessness' noted by the editor reflects a time when corporate liability was a nascent but growing demand for a burgeoning frontier city.
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