This week is the 75th anniversary of the Noronic ship fire, while it was docked at Toronto. Well over a hundred people were killed. I think that this disaster did a lot to promote air travel. It came around the time that the prototype of the De Haviland Comet, considered as the first jet airliner, was first flown.
The knock against mass air travel was the apparently obvious fact that humans would have been given wings if they had been meant to fly, and that flying would naturally be very dangerous. But what this disaster showed is that ships were not exactly safe either. Not only was there the Titanic hitting the iceberg and collisions between ships, there were also fires on ships.
A ship is actually a terrible place to have a fire. In a building fire people in the building usually only have to get outside the building and they are safe. On a ship they still have to worry about surviving in the water. There is usually no limit to the amount of water that can be poured on a building fire. On a ship the water collects in the hull and can sink or capsize the ship.
Ships are made of steel but steel rooms and corridors have an alien feel and produce an unpleasant echo. Steel is also not a good insulator. So the walls are typically covered with some kind of panels. Since they cannot be nailed to steel they must be glued, and this is what is flammable.
Planes took time to become as safe as they are today. I remember when plane crashes were regularly in the news. But I believe that this disaster did a lot to get planes to replace ships.
THE CASE OF THE MORRO CASTLE
While we are on the subject let's take a look at another ship fire, that of the Morro Castle in 1934, and the controversy around the radio operator afterward. I remember watching a documentary about this when I was a teenager.
The Morro Castle was an American passenger ship that was named for the castle in Havana. A fire started while the ship was close to arriving in New York.
The radio operator on the ship, George White, was considered as a hero afterward. In all of the confusion he had risked his life to stay at his post and send out the SOS distress call.
After the disaster, George White drew attention by really basking in the adulation and giving numerous radio and newspaper interviews. He reportedly didn't attend any of the services for those who had died.
It then emerged that George White had a considerable criminal record going back to his early teens. He later went to prison for murder. Interestingly, although he was never convicted of arson, he was suspected of starting fires at places where he worked both before and after the ship disaster. In a separate case he was convicted of the attempted murder of a coworker by an explosive device.
While we cannot state with certainty that George White set the fire on the ship, I notice another strike against him. His assistant, George Alanga, was disliked by the company as a communist or socialist agitator who was always complaining about pay and working conditions and had tried to organize labor strikes. According to one account that I read, Alanga had been told that he was being terminated when the ship got back to New York.
Could George White have lit the fire, probably by a timer device, with the motive of getting attention by playing the hero and knowing that Alanga, who he didn't like, would likely get the blame if it was determined to be arson? Why did he send Alanga to get permission from the captain to send an SOS instead of going himself?
The fire began near vital cables and soon put out the lights on the ship. Could George White, with his knowledge of radio and electricity, have done this purposely? The ship was near shore when the fire started. The objective could have been not a loss of life but a scary situation where the ship had it's lights put out by a fire, and with George White emerging as the hero.
Where would George White get the idea of being a hero in a ship fire?
What I cannot see pointed out about him is that he grew up not far from the site of the 1900 Hoboken Pier Fire. One account is that he was born in 1901, the year after the fire, and must have heard a lot about it while growing up. A lot of cotton bales were piled on the dock, alongside many barrels of various flammable liquids. There was a dry wind from south and a disaster was waiting to happen. No one knows how the fire started but somehow it did. The fire raced along the dock and onto four German ships. Several hundred people were killed in one of America's worst disasters.
The fire on board the General Slocum, four years later, was on the other side of New York City but was far worse. More than a thousand people died. Most of the victims got off the ship, only to drown in the East River because they couldn't swim. It was the worst thing to happen to New York City until 9/11. Bodies washed up on the shore of the river for days.
Both disasters had their heroes who helped rescue people. In a case like this it is helpful to look at what happened while the person was growing up. What I have never seen written about the assassination of John F Kennedy is that not far away lived an eight year old boy named John Hinckley Jr, who would later try to assassinate Ronald Reagan.
George White would also have been nearby, and in his early teens, when the Black Tom Explosion occurred in 1916. This was the sabotage of a vast amount of ammunition before the entry of America into the First World War. It was accomplished by deliberately set fires along a pier.
In other crime investigation, more has been added to "The Wannabe Jack The Ripper" last week.
No comments:
Post a Comment