rescuers reached the top two tiers, they found that the keys would not unlock the cells. Due to the intensity of the heat, some locks had been melted shut or were too warped to open. Guards, firemen, and inmates resorted to axes and sledgehammers to smash the locks. Of the 262 prisoners housed on the top two tiers, only 13 survived. By the time Fire Chief Nice entered the blocks at 6:16, most of the men were dead. At 6:40 the roof over G&H collapsed, preceded by bits of burned timber that ignited anything that would burn, including bedding and mattresses.
One of the more remarkable aspects of the disaster was how guards and convicts forgot their mutual antagonism, at least for the moment, in order to save their brethren. Indeed, for probably the first time in the history of the Ohio penitentiary system, convicts were entrusted with ropes, axes and hammers, and other rescue equipment, items that in quieter times might have been turned into deadly weapons to be used against each other or the guards. In the bedlam, “a Negro convict [ran] with a piece of white cloth over his nose,” carrying a rope and hook, which he made “valiant efforts to throw into a barred window.” He finally succeeded and proceeded to shinny up the rope in an effort to gain entrance to the burning block. At the same moment others were assaulting locked doors with sledgehammers.53 Once freed from their cells, most inmates headed to the safety of the prison yard, while others returned to the cellblocks to help in the rescue efforts.
Inmate survivor Chester Himes featured the fire and the heroism of the convicts in several of his early stories. In one of them, his fictitious alter ego Jimmy Monroe was most impressed by the gallantry of the convicts as they rushed into the burning G&H block. He tried hard to fathom the binary lives of these men “who were in for murder and rape and arson, who had shot down policemen in dark alleys, who had snatched pocket books and run, who had stolen automobiles and forged checks, who had mutilated women and carved their torso into separate arms and legs and heads and packed them into trunks.” How could you explain these men now “working overtime at their jobs of being heroes, moving through the smoke with reckless haste to save some other bastard’s worthless life…. All working like mad at being heroes, some laughing, some solemn, some hysterical—drunk from their momentary freedom, drunk from being brave for once in a cowardly life.” Monroe figured it out: “It was exciting. The fire was exciting. The live ones and the dead ones were exciting. It gave them something to do … something to break the galling monotony of serving time.”54
People die in fires for two reasons: they are burned to death or asphyxiated. Smoke and hot gases produced by a conflagration unite as “deadly enemies.” When fire reaches a certain stage, it creates its own draft and carries itself along. The heat mushrooms up and settles down and suffocates, as it did in the upper tiers of G&H blocks. Making matters worse were the ancient timbers and sheeting exposed on the interior side of the roof in the cellblock under construction. As fumes meet an obstruction like a ceiling or a roof, they spread out laterally until they reach the wall. In this case the wind and the flames conspired to spread death, trapping many convicts in their cells, beyond human aid and fearing what was to come. Their voices joined in a mighty crescendo of screams.
One of the best-chronicled building fires in the history of the United States, the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston, offers insight into how victims often die in fires. The patrons were of course not locked in cells like the Ohio inmates, but they might as well have been. One account described nightclub victims who “seemed to be falling down without even trying to run or to push. They were suffocating. Some were falling victim to carbon monoxide in the thick smoke that was already replacing the oxygen in their bloodstream. Others were burning up inside as they inhaled the superheated air—burning wood and fabric that can generate temperatures … that seared shut their throat and lungs.”55
There were a number of other parallels between these two fires. Both were first reported at 5:20, and both moved with “astonishing speed.” Both were shortlived but resulted in high mortality. At Cocoanut Grove, firefighters not only had to battle flames quickly but had to cope with a frenzied dinner crowd running helter-skelter in the dense black smoke. Similarly to the Ohio Penitentiary event, where guards failed to take charge and use common sense, at the Grove a waiter asked one of the employees for keys to the locked service door, which he knew were kept in the kitchen, and was told, “Not until the boss tells me.”56
The almost twenty-minute gap between when the fire was first discovered and 5:39, when the Columbus Fire Department received its first alarm, meant the difference between rescue and mass death. It took about two minutes for one fire truck and three engine companies under the command of Assistant Fire Chief Osborn to reach the pen from the No. 1 firehouse on Front and Elm Streets. By the time they arrived the fire had already spread through two-thirds of the cell house containing the four blocks. Despite their best efforts, the strong northerly wind continued to push the fire and smoke into the occupied G&H block.57 By 5:45 the firefighters had brought their equipment into the prison. Two minutes later, the first photograph of the fire, taken at 5:47, “showed the north quarter of the roof of cell building already burned down and all the remainder of the roof visible in the picture gutted or in full flame.”58
Upon their arrival the firemen connected a hydrant at the northwest corner of the new auditorium (across the yard from the E&F dormitories and the closest building to I&K) and directed a stream of water into a notch window in the I&K cellblocks. Unfortunately, the heavy iron grilling on the windows caused the stream of water to become “so broken up as to be rendered ineffective,” and the line was soon cut off.59
By the time all pumpers were operational and connected to hydrants, “the fire was burning fiercely and the entire roof over I and K had fallen in.” Initially several convicts took the hose away from some firefighters they thought were not responding fast enough and attempted to carry it into the ranges themselves. They were quickly persuaded to let the firemen work unimpeded. Several more lines were hooked up to pumpers to extinguish the fires burning in bedding and cell furnishings in various cells.
It took the firefighters ten to fifteen minutes after arrival to ascend to the top range of cells, having first had to direct the laying of hose lines outside. Once there, they saw dead men in the cells.60 The firefighters would spend most of their time that evening inside the walls, since they also assisted in the removal of bodies. According to a spokesman for the department on the scene, they believed the fire started from the north end and traveled south with the stiff wind.
Ohio has a legacy of firefighting knowhow. The nation’s first paid fire department was inaugurated in 1853 in Cincinnati, just a hundred miles from Columbus. A year earlier, Boston had introduced a fire box system, making “telegraphy the servant of firefighting.” The precursor to the call box used to summon firefighters to the Columbus fire, it was described as “a system of metal alarm boxes that when ‘pulled’ would immediately transmit their location to a central office. From here the location of the box would be tapped out to all firehouses in the vicinity, so that the nearest one knew to respond first.61
Unlike their modern-day counterparts, alarm boxes in the 1930s were purposely made so they would be difficult to pull. Authorities were concerned that “light-minded people would play with the fire alarm equipment and cause needless runs.” In order to even open the box, an individual reporting a fire would have to retrieve the key, which was kept at a nearby house or business. Not surprisingly, this process often led to delayed alarms. Except for these devices there were surprisingly “few innovations in firefighting until the early twentieth century.”62
