NATIONAL FIRE PROTECTION ASSOCIATION 87 HEX STREET BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

cAugusta, Georgia Conflagration
March 22-23, 1916

Estimated property loss, $4,250,000

Estimated insurance, $3,500,000

Augusta's burned mercantile district showing methods of storing cotton. Cotton Row, loss 20,000 bales, value $1,200,000
The day will come when public policy will not permit a careless and indifferent community, blind to the ethics of fire protection, to place upon other communities the burden of its flagrant transgressions; the price of the luxury of slovenly building and slovenly housekeeping will be paid by those who indulge these propensities.
This Bulletin may be had of tke National Fire Protection ..AMoeiation at TEN CENTS fER COPY
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National Fire Protection Association.
Executive Office, 87 Bfflk Street, Boston, Praaklm H. Wentworth, Secretary

American iMttorte o* Ardhitectt.

Members.

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of the DMtffct of
of New York State.

Ruins of Augusta from top of Chronicle Building
AUGUSTA, GEORGIA, CONFLAGRATION
March 22 and 23, 1916
Augusta, Georgia, with her streets choked with inflammable cotton in violation of her own ordinances, and her roofs covered with wooden shingles in conformancc with them; her valiant fire department crippled by insufficient and obsolete pumping engines in a city of such water-wasters that a hose stream without a pumping engine is impotent, made her contribution of over four million dollars on March 22nd to the ash heap of the nation; and is now planning Teconstruction with the three and a half millions of outside money plucked through fire insurance from the pockets of her sister cities, towns, villages and hamlets of America.
As late as 1913 the hazards of this city, and the inadequacy of its building laws, water supply and fire department equipment to cope with these hazards, were set down in a carefully prepared report by the en gineers of the National Board of Fire Underwriters; and ever since this report was made, the Georgia Fire Prevention Society has been laboring to stir the sluggish comprehension of the community for whose benefit and safeguarding the report was made.
Augusta's officials and citizens were too indifferent to take the advice of those who would have saved her the humiliation of passing the hat to her sister cities for charity. From the stigma of this acceptance of a 83,500,000 charitable donation for her rehabilitation the most elemental official intelligence might have shielded her.
THE FIRE The cause of the fire is unknown; the owner of th^e dry-goods store in which it started locked and left her premises soon after 6 P. M. and at 6.20 P. M. the first alarm came in. The Dyer Building in which this store '*. was a tenant, was a 60,000 five-story and basement brick-walled wooden-joistcd buildir feet) with unprotected interior and exterior openings, the ideal conflagration-breeder for
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KOTE> ML* APOKTioftor CITY stt

Augusta's Commercial Club
each extending from the second floor through the roof with wood frame windows to offices and hallways on each floor added their draft possibilities to the open elevator and stair shafts. Everybody in Augusta who knew anything at all about local fire hazards knew the Dyer Building was a fire trap, with its pressing and cleaning shop, restaurant, and barber shop in the basement, mercantiles on the first floor and offices above.
The fire, starting on the first floor, shot up a light shaft, mushroomed on the fifth floor, and was leap ing in flame into the air through light and elevator shaft and fifth floor windows when the fire department ar rived. Despite the proximity of this well-known fire-trap the exterior openings of adjacent buildings were equally unprotected, offering at once their combustible interiors to the hot tongues of flame from the Dyer Building. With incredible fatuity even such fire-resistive buildings as the Empire Life Building and the Augusta Chronicle Building were equipped with plain glass windows in wooden frames. The Union Savings Bank Building with an area of 38 x 210 feet under one roof had no window protection whatever, though the construction in the same block was mainly light-joisted brick without fire walls, with low parapets, exterior openings unprotected, with numerous frame buildings in the rear and frame appendages above roofs for con veying fire from building to building. Probably no city in the country unless built entirely of wood could offer physical conditions better suited for a conflagration. The Dyer Building was at 8th and Broad Streets on the corner, and the west wind drove the fire eastward down and toward the river, leaping 8th Street sixtyfive feet to the wooden window frames of the Union Savings Bank Building and hurling brands along Reynolds Street into the east section of the cotton district, with its bales of cotton in the open street, its brick ware houses without fire walls and with wooden buildings in the rear.
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The Augusta Chronicle and Empire Life Buildings: . sacrifice to unprotected window openings
Historic St. Pauls Church. This loss is national 6

Below Fifth Street on the southwest side of Broad Street frame dwellings predominated, the majority with wooden shingle roofs. Although Broad Street is 165 feet wide, and Greene Street, two blocks southwest of Broad Street is 162 feet wide, either of which should have made a good fire-break, sparks and brands fell upon these shingle roofs, ignited them and the buildings they covered, and the fire then swept southeast to the city limits, an overtaxed fire department being powerless to check it.
The west wind driving the fire down the river was the saving feature for the remainder of the mercan tile district where the construction is just as bad. In aH the unburned remaining blocks of this congested district the conditions are such as to invite a continuance of the devastation by another sfrnrtar fire.
COTTON STORAGE IN THE STREETS
When the inflammable nature of cotton is considered its storage inside the mercantile district (even in old fashioned brick warehouses without fire walls) contributes a sufficient menace to the heart of the city; but the storage of cotton in Augusta was largely in the open street. At times of congestion practically all the streets northeast of Broad Street from Sixth to Tenth Streets are so choked with cotton bales that vehicles can scarcely pass. At the time of the fire this condition existed on Reynolds Street from Seventh almost to Ninth and about one-third the loss in cotton was here. These conditions have thus been permitted to exist in the heart of the city, daily and nightly exposing the mercantile district, in violation of an ordinance pro hibiting it. Every season the fire department has been compelled to maintain a patrol to keep open a path for its engines and to prevent hydrants being blocked by cotton bales. Cotton has been stored in the streets even when the warehouses were vacant. This amazing practice, in a city in which the conflagration hazard was and is yet so great, bewilders the sense like the spectacle of a mother storing gasoline and matches under the cradle of her child.
In the early stages of this fire cotton in the streets at once ignited from sparks and prevented the fire men from connecting to adjacent hydrants, thus hampering their work and feeding the conflagration. Nttmeroos special bulletins emphasizing this extreme hazard had been issued by the South-Eastera Underwriters* Association prior to this fire.
THE WOODEN SHINGLE
In this fire the wooden shingle performed its usual historic function of setting fire to the large residence area. The shingle roofs were dry, no rain having fallen for two weeks. The fine brick residences adjacent to the mercantile district and several wooden ones had metal roofs but the fire all about them was too hot
Sheltering Augusta's Homeless 7

The Once Beaatifal Barren Residence
The Haaghton Grammar School, Aagasta 8

to prevent their lateral ignition. Soon after the fire crossed Seventh Street the wind shifted to northwest and the sparks which had been mainly driven in the direction of the river began igniting shingle roofs below Fifth Street. Up to this time the fire had not crossed Broad Street to the south. Eyewitnesses state that the first building to ignite on the southwest side of Broad Street was a frame shingled roof structure in the rear of 212 Broad Street near Second Street. At this time the main body of the fire was between Sixth and Seventh Streets, four blocks northwest. Adjacent shingle roofs were soon ignited and the fire department being busy trying to save the mercantile district, the conflagration then had an unimpeded path four blocks wide to the city limits, with plenty of fuel. Greene Street with its wide space and center parkway of trees would have confined the fire to the north but for the wooden shingle. Augusta's official record in shingle roof legis lation is as amazing as her other fire protection performances. After repeated urging by the Chief of the fire department an ordinance prohibiting shingle roofs throughout the city was adopted in 1908. In 1914 this ordinance was amended to allow the use of wooden shingles except in the area bounded by the river, Fif teenth, Gwinnett and Fifth Streets. In J9J6, six weeks before the fire, the city council stiH further reduced this prohibited area!
After the fire, on April 5, 1916, the building code recommended by the National Board of Fire Under writers was adopted, once more prohibiting new wooden shingle roofs inside city limits. The fire limits were also extended by the adoption of this code to include the territory bounded by Fourth, Greene, Fifth, Walker, Sixth, Fenwick, Thirteenth, Third Level Canal, Fourteenth, Jones and Thirteenth Streets. The fire limits before the conflagration are shown on the map herewith. They did not even wholly include either the cotton warehouse district or the principal mercantile district.
THE WATER SUPPLY
Augusta's water is obtained from a city-owned canal or direct from the Savannah River. It flows by gravity from a sedimentation basin through a single 24-inch main 17,300 feet long. About iM miles from the basin a pressure regulator is installed in the line with a 24-inch normally closed by-pass around it. The regulator maintains normally a constant pressure of 20 pounds on the down stream side, which under average operation is a reduction of 30 pounds, the up-stream side having 50 pounds. Consumption is excessive and wastage large, the latter averaging 200 gallons a day per capita. As the consumption rate on an average nearly equals the normal filter capacity, and during the day exceeds it, and tests have indicated that the leak age from the system increases about 2,000,000 gallons a day when the regulator is by-passed, it has been neces sary to throttle the pressure as above although the fire department is short of pumping equipment and must rely on hydrant streams to a considerable extent.
Pressures in the city were lowest from 9 to n P. M. March 22nd, averaging about 35 pounds, rising slowly to 40 pounds after the opening of the by-pass at ten o'clock. No attempt *.vas made by the water department to close service connections during the fire. Sonic of the larger ones were buried by falling walls or were too close to burning buildings to be operated. Connections to sprinklered buildings which burned were provided with gates, but they were in interior courts where they could not be reached. In several in stances the fire department had to leave hydrants open; in one case cutting a steamer suction to save the steamer itself. Because of the insufficient pumping capacity available in steamers and motor pumps (only five of the seven companies being so equipped, and two of these having engines of small capacity in poor con dition) it was the weak hydrant streams or nothing to fight with. Attempts to use these, particularly on Reynolds Street in the cotton district, gave streams of no value where any heat was encountered. In the residential section with its 6-inch supply-pipe and hydrants with single outlets there was so little water that even streams from garden hose could not be had for wetting wooden shingles.
THE HOSE COUPLINGS
The tragic comedy of the American anarchy in hydrant threads and hose couplings was again enacted with dramatic effect by Augusta's zealous and friendly neighbors rushing to her aid in response to her tele graphic cries for help. Waynesboro department, 32 miles distant, came with a big automobile combination chemical and hose wagon and 1150 feet of hose without a pump, making the run in 45 minutes under its own power. The fire was just crossing Broad Street when it arrived about 8.50 P. M. It tried to couple to two or three hydrants and found that the Waynesboro hose threads did not match the Augusta hydrant threads. The Macon department came 125 miles to learn the same thing. The Atlanta department came 171 miles to find itself in the same predicament. It was a luminous and highly educative performance in mutual aid, reminiscent of the helpful endeavors of the celebrated Happy Hooligan.
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;* The residence district: a forest of chimneys
The Fargo and Goold residences, Augusta's handsomest homes 10

The visiting departments were useful, however, as far as they could be without the preliminary knowl edge necessary to make their co-operation effective. Chaos in hydrant and hose threads is a national disease, and Georgia is no more backward in this than eighty per cent of her sister states. All of the visiting firemen busied themselves in some fashion if only in the salvage of cotton, and the departments which brought pump ing engines were of positive assistance wherever they could get suction. Charleston brought an adapter coupling and an out-of-town corporation salvaging cotton from the previous fire (March 2oth) had three uni versal couplings to lend. The Savannah and Macon companies helped the Augusta department extinguish a second fire at Twelfth and Dugas Streets.
THE FIRE DEPARTMENT
The Augusta fire department, directed by Frank G. Reynolds, a capable and progressive fire chief, did the best it could. It was like a courageous gladiator fighting a giant with a broken sword; it had no chance from the start. Chief Reynolds' attempt to abolish the wooden shingle hazard had been finally defeated, and the council had handicapped the department by abolishing the office of second assistant chief who acted as captain of the ladder company at headquarters. Insufficient water, inadequate engines, the streets full of cotton, and the fire starting in a fire trap that was a furnace from cellar to roof before the firemen could reach it such were the conditions Chief Reynolds had to face. The first box came in at 6.20 P. M. and the Chief ordered a general alarm at 6.23 as the flames from the Dyer Building were already shooting from the fifth floor. There were several people on the upper floors and those who could reach the fire-escapes (two vertical iron ladders previously condemned as unsafe by Chief Reynolds) were descending them. There were, how ever, two women trapped on the fourth floor whose lives were saved with a 55-foot extension ladder, while the Assistant Chief went into the third floor to make sure no others were trapped. Five hose streams were then directed into the building. The draft of the fire was drawing papers out of the offices and pro jecting them in flames through light and elevator shafts out of the fifth floor windows broken by the heat. When the Union Savings Bank Building burst into flames across Eighth Street telegrams for outside aid were sent. The walls of the Dyer Building began to fall following the collapse of its heavily loaded floors, and the department then turned to checking the fire's spread. The Merchants' Bank (821 Broad Street) had a blank brick wall on its exposed side, but fire entered through skylights in wooden frames projecting above the roof and damaged the upper floor. The brick wall, however, enabled the firemen to hold the fire from spreading further in that direction.
The fire was by this time burning fiercely in the cotton warehouse district along Reynolds and Seventh Streets, and as heat at this point was so intense as to prevent apparatus from being stationed, and as the wind was driving flames in this direction, the Chief attempted to check the fire at the fireproof (Empire and Chronicle) buildings on Broad Street, and drive the flames to the river. However, on account of the un protected windows (ordinary glass in wood frames) in both of these buildings, and the unprotected openings in interior wall of a three-story brick structure in the rear of the Chronicle Building, both of these attempts failed. While these buildings were of some advantage for a short time, the poor construction of adjoining properties and the fact that adequate window protection was not provided on the two fireproof buildings, allowed flames to communicate through unprotected windows in sides and rear, driving away the firemen, who had connected an engine to the standpipe in the Chronicle Building and were fighting the fire from the inside.
Another stand was made at the Citizens and Southern Bank, which had a good fire wall and fire was checked here and driven north half a block from Broad Street. At this point the path of the flames was only half a block wide and buildings in this vicinity, with exception of one two-story school and one three-story Y. W. C. A. Building, were all one-story, and there is little doubt that with more engines or sufficient pressure to permit the use of direct hydrant streams the fire might have been checked at Seventh Street. (See attached map showing extent of conflagration.)
The report of the National Board of Fire Underwriters, published in February, 1913, states that engine capacity was inadequate and that two of the engines, one of which was in reserve but had since that time been placed in service, were in poor condition. In the recommendations of that report, three additional engines were asked for, or that pressures on the water system be raised to So pounds and additional mains provided to give 6,000 gallons a minute fire flow with a residual pressure permitting direct hydrant streams. Only one pumping engine had been purchased and put in service, and pressures on the water system had not been increased. Had either of these recommendations been complied with, the fire might have been checked at Seventh Street and at least 82,000,000 worth of property saved.
It was when the fire crossed Seventh Street and the wind shifted that the wooden shingles became a fac tor and the roofs below Fifth Street took the fire and spread it.
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The Young Women's Christian Association
The Tubman High School 32

GENERAL

The interval between the start of the fire and its control covered a period of ten hours and forty minutes

and in its course of destruction it covered an area of one-quarter square mile, or about 160 acres, destroyed

141 business buildings and 541 dwellings and gutted two buildings of fire-resistive construction. There were

several narrow escapes of life; 600 families and 3,000 persons were made homeless and about 1,000 were thrown

oat of employment. The property loss is about 4,250,000 with insurance loss of about $3,500,000.

Among some of the notable buildings destroyed were St. Paul's Episcopal Church, which was 128 years

old; two city schools, Y. W. C. A. Building, Commercial Club, and some of the oldest and best dwellings in

the city.

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As before suggested the underlying conditions of poor construction which made such a catastrophe pos

sible are generally present to a large extent in the remaining part of the mercantile and dwelling districts and

are considerably more pronounced in some sections of the city which were not destroyed.

LESSONS OF THE FIRE
Practically the only lessons to be learned from the conflagration beside that open street cotton storage is hazardous are those taught by every other conflagration of the past half-century. They may be sum marized as follows:
The utter inability of the fire department to control a fire in a building of large area and height in which fire can spread from cellar to roof in a period of time shorter than that in which the fire department can re spond and get into effective operation.
The necessity for eliminating frame additions to brick buildings, protecting interior and exterior wall openings, enclosing vertical openings, as well as the necessity for proper construction of parapets, skylights and dormer windows.
The need of an ample water supply and a pressure giving effective hydrant steams under requirements, or of having all fire companies equipped with an ample supply of pumping engines.
The danger arising from the storage of cotton in the streets, which not only spreads the fire but pre vents engine companies from working at advantageous points.
The inability of a fireproof building to act as a fire barrier when its exterior openings are not protected. The danger of the wooden shingle and the manner in which it spreads fire beyond the ability of a fire department to control, even when a fair proportion of the buildings are brick and have non-combustible roofs, and are not congested. The further fact that wide streets do not form a fire-break when wooden shingle roof construction is present.

The conditions allowed to exist so long in Augusta, which finally resulted as such conditions always ulti mately result, are present to some extent in many other American cities.
In other American cities beside Augusta irresponsible and ignorant public officials are also ignoring the warnings of their fire chiefs and the reports of fire protection engineers. Augusta through the ignorance and indifference of those to whom she intrusted her public welfare is now taking toll of the American people. Her fire cannot be construed as a misfortune; it is a form of mendicancy. She has no right to the three arid a half million dollars she is taking from the backs of the men and women outside her borders, because this fire might easily have been prevented. The intelligent portion of the American people is becoming impatient of this form of charity, and communities which require to be helped will some day have first to deserve to be helped. Augusta should spend her ill-gotten money prayerfully; and other cities equally culpable with officials equally callous to the warnings of intelligence should profit by her experience. More important than the fires that have already occurred are those fires that are likely to occur.

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