Fire Department Botches North End Blaze
A carpenter shop burns to the ground as equipment fails and engines fail to build pressure.
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 small carpenter shop in the rear of a lot at 3128 North Eighth street was destroyed by fire this afternoon, entailing a loss of about $300. The work of fighting the flames was a farce, according to persons who watched the efforts of the fire department. Handicapped by poor equipment, the firemen from house No. 9 were unable to cope with the blaze, and had the fire been in a larger building, great damage might have resulted. The inadequacy of the equipment was fully demonstrated when a hose broke in the middle of the street, cutting off the stream of water which was being played on the blaze, and the firemen were unable to get up enough steam in the fire engine to operate it.
“The work of fighting the flames was a farce, according to persons who watched the efforts of the fire department.”
Public safety infrastructure failures are a perennial Tacoma concern. Today, the city grapples with the reliability of emergency response, just as citizens in the North End questioned the capabilities of their municipal fire department in 1913.
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