| OCR Text |
Show FIFTY MEET DEATH IN FACTORY FIRE VICTIMS FAILED TO HEED ALARM UNTIL FLAMES HAD CUT OFF EVERY AVENUE OF ESCAPE. Women and Girls Thought Alarm Was for Fire Drill and When They Real-ized Real-ized Their Danger it was Too Late to Escape Down Narrow Stairway. Binghampton, N. Y. Fifty-two persons, per-sons, most of them women and girls, and all employed in the frame, tinder-box factory of the Binghampton Clothing company, died in a lire which swept that building Tuesday afternoon. Fifty more persons were injured, a dozen of them fatally. The girls, who had become annoyed at too frequent fire drills, thought the alarm which sounded at 2:30 o'clock Tuesday afternoon was only another drill and refused to ' heed it. The flames had cut off every avenue of escape es-cape to most of the women employes before they realized that their lives were actually in danger. While many girls lost their lives because they did not heed the alarm of fire, it seems certain that the nar- row stairway ana inadequate are escapes es-capes would not have furnished sufficient suf-ficient arteries of egress in such a fire had the 125 employes responded promptly to the call. Less than one-fifth of the persons in the building escaped death or serious seri-ous injury. The two hospitals of this city and many homes and private institutions in-stitutions house the fifty injured. The big outstanding fact of the catastrophe ca-tastrophe is its suddenness. In this , it bears a strong resemblance to the disaster in New York, where 147 lives were lost when the inflammable material and the waists littering toe floors blazed up with incredible rapidity ra-pidity and set the imprisoned workers work-ers jumping from the windows to . their death. Another resemblance to the New York disaster is that the fire is believed to have been started by tne throwing away of a cigarette butt or a match. |
