The Bridge That Saved a Boarding House
A ten-minute delay caused by a passing ship allowed firefighters to extinguish a blaze in the St. Paul Tacoma Lumber Company’s housing before it could spread.
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.
Fire broke out in the boarding house of the St. Paul Tacoma Lumber Company on the flats yesterday morning. In response to an alarm the apparatus started on the run. At the 17th Street bridge there was a delay of ten minutes, as the bridge was turned to let a ship through.
By the time the trucks reached the building the fire had been put out. It had been caused by a defective flue. The damage was nominal.
This incident highlights the precarious nature of early 20th-century industrial housing, where workers lived in company-owned structures prone to simple hazards like faulty heating. The 'nominal' damage was likely due to the serendipitous delay at the bridge—a reminder that infrastructure bottlenecks can have unexpected, even beneficial, consequences for public safety.
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