by Ed O'Donnell
The Slocum had two fire stations, one at either end of the steamer’s starboard side. Each consisted of a standpipe with a wheel valve and a coupling designed to accommodate a fire hose. Suspended above was a coil of fifty feet of hose. Theoretically this arrangement, along with two hand- operated fire pumps, provided the Slocum with total coverage in the event of a fire.
The nearest fire station was thirty feet forward of the blazing lamp room. Flanagan reached it moments after notifying Conklin and pulled the gray fire hose down with a musty thump. He quickly attached the hose’s coupling to the standpipe while Tom Collins, a deckhand hired only four days earlier, grabbed the nozzle and made for the fire ten yards aft. As he ran, the hose twisted and kinked every couple of feet.
Flanagan then spun round the wheel valve to open the flow of water into the fire hose. At first everything seemed to work flawlessly. Water surged through the pipe and the pressure jolted the hose to life.
Then it all went awry. Collins shouted that he had only a trickle of water, and the reason immediately became obvious to Flanagan and the other deckhands. The creases and kinks in the hastily unfurled hose became choke points, allowing only a fraction of the water through. Several men jumped to straighten the hose out, but it was too late. What was cheap unlined linen hose in 1891 was by 1904 utterly useless. Rotten and weak, the never-tested hose was incapable of handling the high water pressure caused by the kinking and it burst in five or more places, sending streams of water everywhere but out the nozzle. A second later and the pressure tore the hose from its coupling. As water rushed out across the deck, Flanagan and several deckhands looked up to see that the flames had now reached the top of the stairs and were moving in their direction.
Just then Walter Payne, the African-American porter, rushed in with a rubber hose. Surely, they thought, this one would withstand the water pressure. Frantically, Flanagan and his men tried to attach it to the standpipe, but to their astonishment it would not fit. In their excited state they had failed to notice that the coupling from the torn fire hose was still attached to the standpipe, thus preventing the attachment of the rubber hose. “I saw then,” recalled William Ortman, who watched the struggle from the ice cream stand, “that the boat was doomed.”
Flanagan, now nearly out of his mind with panic, decided there was nothing left to do. “Get to the boats,” he shouted, and everyone scattered. No further effort to fight the flames would be made by the crew, not even to slow its progress. This became one of several factors, along with rotten life preservers, that transformed the crisis into a catastrophe. Ortman was right about the Slocum. There was no saving it. The only uncertainty remaining was the fate of her thirteen hundred passengers.
Up in the pilothouse, Van Schaick and his pilots had just begun to relax, for they had just guided the Slocum through Hell Gate without incident. The steamboat was now just passing a shallow called Sunken Meadow, approximately even with East 110th Street. Suddenly at 10:06 A.M., seven minutes after Coakley discovered the fire and three minutes after he notified Flanagan, word of the unfolding disaster finally reached the pilothouse. “The ship’s on fire!” boomed Flanagan’s terror-stricken voice through the blower.
Calm, Van Schaick thought to himself, project calm. In five decades on the water, through all manner of scrapes, he’d learned the value of keeping his head. Crewmen, both good and bad, instinctively adopted the demeanor of their captain in crisis situations. Keep cool and the crew listens and follows orders; panic and the situation dissolves into chaos. “I’ll go down and see about it,” he said coolly to his pilots, instructing them matter-of-factly to hold the boat’s course and increase speed to full power.
Opening the pilothouse door once again brought no rollicking sounds of Maurer’s band, for it had stopped playing. Instead, above the engine’s drone, the captain detected sounds of commotion. But he had no time to discern what it was about, for no sooner had his foot touched the deck outside than a torrent of flame exploded out of the steamer’s lower port side, reaching upward to the decks above. It seemed, he later testified, “like a volcano.” Suddenly he could hear what the commotion was about—it was the chilling sound of women and children screaming.
Instinctively, Van Schaick moved quickly to the stairs to get a closer look. This was worse than any fire he’d experienced on one of his steamboats, and he needed to know its extent and speed in order to decide upon a plan of action. With his men manning the fire hoses—surely, he thought, they must have at least one good stream of water on it by now—it might be contained long enough for them to get to safety. He hit the stairs and started down when he met the fire dashing upward. “I got part of the way down,” he recalled, “and the fire drove me back. It was sweeping up from below like a tornado.”
This is it, he thought, as he sprinted back to the pilothouse. I’ve lost her. It was the moment all captains spend their careers not thinking about—the loss of their vessel. He’d seen all manner of maritime disasters in the course of his fifty years—deadly collisions, boiler explosions, founderings in storm, sudden sinkings, and uncontrollable fires. But these had always been other captains’ tragedies. He’d had his share of near misses—who didn’t—and he knew that the longer he kept at it, the greater the likelihood his turn would come. As the poem about Jim Bludso and his Prairie Belle stated so matter-of-factly,
All boats has their day on the Mississip,
And her day come at last,—
Running toward the pilothouse away from the flames, Van Schaick knew in an instant that the Slocum’s day had come. After half a century on the water, he’d lost his first boat. What he did not know—or refused at that moment to even consider—was that unlike the great Jim Bludso, he would not get all his passengers to shore.
GOD HELP US
Pastor Haas had just completed his tour to the steamboat’s three decks, a ritual he performed at the outset of every excursion. Walking about the three decks allowed him to mingle with his flock and play the role of host. Equally important, it enabled him to make sure everything was in order aboard the boat. This year’s choice to charter the Slocum had made the latter task a mere formality, for it appeared to him to be in tip-top shape. Striding along the shiny varnished floorboards of the promenade deck with the warm spring breeze tussling his dark hair, he smiled at the passengers and looked for his family.
The pleasure of the moment was broken by a most unexpected sight. Haas saw smoke coming up a narrow stairway leading down to the main deck. No need to panic, he thought, it must be coming from the galley. He’d just passed that way a few minutes earlier and saw the cooks preparing the chowder. He stood there calmly for a minute, hoping the smoke would soon abate. A few passengers took notice and drew near to him, fixing an anxious, expectant gaze in him that asked, Is everything all right?
The answer came quick enough. Instead of diminishing, the smoke in tensified and grew darker. Worse, it smelled of burning wood, not food, and carried with it the muffled sounds of commotion and confusion down below. Immediately, Haas knew this was serious. A real fire had broken out below and it was growing stronger. He, like Van Schaick, also knew that his chief responsibility was to prevent panic. No matter how this dangerous situation was resolved, it was absolutely essential that everyone remain calm. To do this, he understood, he’d have to lie. Under these circumstances, God would surely forgive him.
“It’s just the coffee burning in the galley,” he lied to the group of anxious onlookers. Nothing to worry about, he assured them. But as a precaution, he suggested they move to the stern of the boat. Then with an exaggerated slowness designed to obscure the storm then roiling within him, he strolled away to find his wife and daughter. Out of respect, his listeners played along, waiting until he was a reasonable distance away before bolting to spread the alarm and find their loved ones.
The fear of fire that lay dormant deep within them all had, just like the fire itself, suddenly come to life.
Just below Haas on the main deck, the f
ire was about to pounce on its first victims. Ten minutes earlier the word had gone out along the decks that ice cream would be served down on the main deck. Martha Liebenow, the unmarried sister of Paul Liebenow and Annie Weber, swept up her three-year-old niece Anna and took six-year-old Helen by the hand. She would take them, along with their older cousins Emma and Frank, she explained to their parents, downstairs for the ice cream. We’ll be right back, Aunt Martha assured the adults, who smiled at the prospect of a few minutes of peace without the children.
They moved quickly, for they could see that scores of other children had the same idea. “Children were falling all over each other,” one boy later recalled, “in an effort to get to the tables which held the refreshments.”
Just a few feet away in the engine room was the group of young boys and their mothers who had gathered to watch the mighty Fletcher engine in action. A few minutes earlier they’d seen Flanagan burst into the engine room, but they had not heard him tell Conklin of the fire. While the boys watched in hypnotic wonder the thumping rods and pounding piston, their indulgent mothers covered their ears and fanned themselves in the hot and cacophonous room.
“Suddenly and without the least warning,” recounted thirteen-year-old John Ell, “there was a burst of flames from the furnace-room that rushed up through the engine room and flashed out about us.” Terrified and disoriented, the boys and mothers came shrieking into the room where the ice cream was being served, their clothes and hair on fire. “There was a most terrible panic,” he remembered, as everyone struggled to get to the side of the boat. Ell tried to run with his mother and brother, whose clothes were ablaze, but he fell and the crowd swept them away. Martha Liebenow, her nieces, and nephew were doubtless caught up in this mad rush to get away from the fire. If they managed to get out of the room—and many did not— they were swept along with the crowd and pinned to the railing, which soon gave way. Even if they hung on at this point, they had little time left, for the fire had by now swept past, leaving them surrounded by a rapidly closing circle of flame.
On the deck above, the Webers and Liebenows did not hear the panic that was now consuming their children and sister, but someone did notice the black smoke wafting upward. “It was a big puff,” remembered Annie Weber, “and it startled everyone.” But when someone said it must be the chowder boiling over in the galley, “we all laughed at our fears.” Such reactive denial of real peril, say psychologists who study responses to disasters, is very common. People are either too engrossed in an activity to allow the sight of danger to register or, as was the case with the Webers and Liebenows, they are too terrified to acknowledge it. In either case this denial is always short-lived. On the promenade deck of the Slocum it lasted less than five seconds. “The laughing changed to a cry of horror,” said Annie, “when a sheet of flame followed the smoke.”
Suddenly above the strains of music, they could hear the sounds of commotion below. In an instant, pandemonium broke out as people rushed to the railings to see for themselves. They could see people scurrying about and hear them shouting about a fire. Almost immediately, recounted one survivor, “there was a loud roar as though a cannon had been shot off, and the entire bow of the boat was a sheet of flames.” Adding to the terror of the moment was the sudden realization that some passengers were already leaping over the railings into the river.
Paul and Anna Liebenow had the same reaction as every parent on board—where are the children! The last they had seen of them they were descending the stairs with their Aunt Martha—the same stairwell now belching smoke and flame. Stay here and wait for us, Liebenow and his brother-in-law Frank Weber told their wives. They would find the children. Anna Liebenow clutched her six-month-old Adella to her chest as she watched the two men head aft and disappear into the veil of smoke.
By now smoke was visible on the hurricane deck. One of the first to notice was a six-year-old girl named Lillie Manheimer. While the adults in her group chattered away and bounced to the sounds of Professor Maurer’s band, her wandering eyes caught sight of a steady stream of smoke emanating from below. It took her a minute or so to summon the temerity to intrude upon the conversation and say, “I think the boat is on fire, auntie. See all the smoke?” Her Aunt Millie yanked her aside and scolded. “Hush!” she said. “You must not talk so; you may create a panic.” She was right—the fear of fire was so great that the mere mention of it frequently touched off deadly panics.
The crowd on the main afterdeck were among the last to know of the fire. The seven members of Professor George Maurer’s band were filling the air with the sounds of festive music, obscuring temporarily the shouts of panic and alarm breaking out amidships and above. But in that brief moment of silence between the strains of the last note and the start of the audience’s applause, a piercing shriek could be heard coming from the forward part of the vessel. Everyone, including the musicians, froze in terror—an instinctual response to sudden fright found in virtually all mam mals—and listened. Many thought someone, most likely a child, had fallen overboard, but most sensed that something worse was transpiring.
Maurer, still at the center of attention, hesitated a moment, not sure what to do. He looked over to his wife and three daughters seated nearby and read the pleading look of terror in their eyes. This would not be a scene anticipating the famed decision of the band aboard the Titanic to continue playing as the liner went down. There simply wasn’t any time (the Titanic took two hours and forty minutes to sink). Looking forward, Maurer saw billows of black smoke heading in his direction and heard the unmistakable cries of “Fire!” This was a matter of seconds, he thought, minutes at best.
He dropped his baton, an unspoken signal to the musicians and crowd alike that it was time to act. Bedlam broke out in an instant as dozens of passengers snapped out of their momentary catatonic state and began running. In scenes now being played out all over the boat, some ran for children and other loved ones, others made for the racks of life preservers, while a handful pleaded for calm.
Not everyone panicked at this moment. In every situation of extreme stress and chaos, there are those who possess a unique ability to remain calm, think clearly, and formulate a wise plan of action. It is a capacity as vital to a commander’s success on the field of battle as it is to a person caught in an unfolding disaster. Kate Kassenbaum was just such a person. “I realized that we were in the gravest peril,” she remembered, “and that if we expected to escape with our lives some of us at least must keep cool heads.” She called her ten family members together at the railing and in a calm and quiet manner explained that they must stick together and help each other out.
Mary Hartman was made of the same stuff. She held the hands of her two daughters, twelve-year-old Clara and fifteen-year-old Margaret, and pulled them to her side. We must stick together, she told them, until the steamer docks or we can clamber aboard a rescue boat. The firmness of her voice gave the girls hope that they would be saved. But as all three looked toward the bow of the Slocum, a chill of terror went through them. Bearing down upon them, the Kassenbaums, and everyone else were two destructive forces moving at roughly the same speed—a huge mob of panic- stricken passengers followed by a wall of orange fire.
“God help us!” Clara Hartman remembered her mother saying. “God help us!”
PANIC
Pastor Haas was one of the fortunate ones, for only a minute after leaving the smoking stairwell, he found his wife and daughter. Quietly, so as to prevent panic, he whispered to them to follow him to the stern of the boat. It became very clear almost immediately, however, that panic—that unquantifiable, deadly force—had begun to spread. Haas quickly realized that his calm pronouncements that people should begin moving to the stern were as unnecessary as they were unheard. Everyone, excepting those in search of missing family members, was scurrying aft.
Just as soon as Haas had guided his family to the stern railing of the promenade deck, he left them and ventured forward through the stream of terrified passen
gers. If ever his flock needed a shepherd it was now, and Haas did not flinch. “Stay calm!” he urged in a tone loud enough to project authority while avoiding any hint of fear. “Stay calm!” John Holthusen, the Sunday school principal, later remembered the scene with awe. “Pastor Haas seemed to be everywhere—calm and collected, striving to stay the panic.”
Psychologists and sociologists who study crowd behavior note that groups typically disintegrate into panic and chaos in situations where there is no leader to offer direction and reassurance. The history of disasters and near disasters, not to mention warfare, is full of stories where the timely assertion of leadership averts a panic. On board the Slocum that morning were three potential leaders: the steamboat’s officers, police officers Van Tassel and Kelk, and Haas. While the first proved utterly incapable of exerting any kind of meaningful leadership, the policemen and Haas acted in exemplary fashion, urging calm and giving direction.
But the fire aboard the Slocum was no ordinary situation of terror. Unlike a theater fire, where the crowd at least knows that safety lies just beyond the building’s walls, the fire aboard the Slocum presented an unthinkable scenario—a fire from which there was virtually no escape. They were surrounded by water, something the passengers considered only slightly less terrifying than fire—even with life preservers strapped on. In this unique setting, no amount of leadership could stem the rising tide of panic.
In 1904 people were just beginning to understand the dynamics of what turns a crowd into a panicked mob. Only recently (1897) French psychologist and sociologist Gustave Le Bon had given a name—“contagion”—to the process by which emotions, including panic, spread through a crowd. But precisely how panics become contagious would not come to light for decades. Today most sociologists and psychologists see panic as developing in a series of escalating stages. First, in a large group faced with a situation of extreme stress and fear, a small number of people succumb to their feelings of terror and begin acting in an antisocial and individualistic manner. They refuse to take direction and begin to see the people around them as mere obstacles to their frantic quest to escape. They push and claw, for example, their way to an exit. Second, as Le Bon observed, such behavior becomes contagious, spreading quickly through the rest of the crowd. As panic spreads, it gains momentum and intensity. Feeding off one another’s fear, people become ever more focused on self-preservation, and as a result, more violent. Finally, the crowd reaches a stage sociologists term “demoralization,” where individuals shed any remaining social constraints and descend into an atavistic struggle for survival. In this “kill or be killed” state of mind, normally peaceable and moral people will bite, pummel, or trample anyone who gets in their way.