Stuff You Should Know - Why There Aren't So Many Hotel Fires Anymore

Episode Date: August 28, 2018

1946 was a particularly deadly year for hotel fires in the US. Fires killed hundreds of people in Chicago, Dubuque, Dallas and, in Atlanta, the worst hotel fire in American history broke out. Find out how they made staying in hotels safe. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there, the gang's all here,

which means that it's time for Stuff You Should Know. So settle down, everybody, be quiet. Yeah, the hotel fire edition, which will not be chock full of laughs, probably. No, no, it really won't. I don't know what it is about hotel fires that always fascinated me, but they did. I think it was the 1980 MGM Grand Fire that got me.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, but there's just something extra creepy about a hotel fire to me. And it turns out that there have been some big ones and some bad ones, and in this one particular year, enough of them happened that America finally got off its duff and started doing something about it. Yeah, and also, while reading this,

I was kind of thinking, like, why weren't there a dozen more of these that year, or in any surrounding year, when you look at how, well, how unsafe things were and how, you know, I know people complain about the government regulating things, but sometimes it's nice to say you should have fire sprinklers and fire alarms or you can't do business.

Yeah, that's a really good point. This is a great example of that, you're right. It's also a great example of how people smoking can, used to be able to just kill dozens or scores of people by falling asleep with a cigarette or tossing it somewhere or something stupid, you know? Yeah, I mean, one of these hotels had, and we'll get into the nitty gritty of the,

just how flammable these places were back then, and it's amazing the steps that they've taken over the years to make things safer, but I think one of these places had like seven layers of wallpaper upon wallpaper, which were all highly, highly flammable. Yeah, they were your- Like burlap walls sometimes, like stuff that just, if you look at it wrong, it'll catch fire.

It's like, what'd you just say? Yeah. I'm catching fire. They were using Firebug Special brand wallpaper. It was that bad, yeah. It wouldn't surprise me, well, of course they wouldn't do that, but everything, I don't know, it was just, everything was really flammable, it seemed like. Flammable, dangerous, pajamas were very flammable.

This, everything was flammable back then, way more than these days. All the things you smoke in. Right. Smoking jackets were flammable. Yeah, cigarettes, flammable. So this one year, so there were tons and tons of hotel fires, it was a thing. But in 1946, it just got particularly bad,

and it was just coincidence. There wasn't anything really that connected these fires, but there were a handful of hotel fires that year that happened quickly enough and were big enough, or happened close enough to one another, I should say, and then were big enough, had enough of a casualties and deaths from them that it caught the attention of the public

and something was finally done. And it was 1946 when it happened. And the first one was in June. Yes, June 5th in Chicago, Illinois, the LaSalle Hotel. So here's how this one went down. It was after the school year had ended, so this hotel was really packed. A lot of families would, and still do,

if you live in the suburbs or rural areas, would flood into the city after the school year. They bring their kids, they go shopping, they go to the zoo, they do city things, as sort of like a post-school vacation. And so all of this hotel was full. 1,000 rooms apparently were fully occupied, and like so many of these, they started late at night.

Yeah, and the cocktail lounge, the Silver Grill cocktail lounge on the ground floor of the LaSalle, and the cocktail wait staff had a long-standing method of disposing of cigarette butts at the end of the night from all the ashtrays, from the empty the ashtrays. They just dump them in a cardboard box that they kept in a closet behind the bar.

Yeah, I thought you were gonna say they had a way of getting people out of the bar, which was to crank up. They just set it on fire. No, usually you crank up. What's that really bad band that everyone hates? 38th Special. Oh, no, that's one everyone loves.

Oh, okay. Now this is a Canadian band that everyone makes fun of all the time. Nickelback. Rush. No, you cranked Nickelback. I thought you were gonna say they cranked Nickelback. No, although I don't know what that would have done

to people in 1946. Yeah, their minds might have been blown. Maybe they were a band out of time and place. Yeah, so they didn't player any Nickelback. Everybody just left on their own accord, but after they left this box of smoldering cigarette butts, cardboard box of smoldering cigarette butts in a closet. It's crazy.

In one of the world's most flammable hotels caught, like their luck ran out. I can't believe that it didn't happen sooner, but that's what happened. Somebody, I think, smelled smoke and very quickly after that, they saw a little bit of flames coming from, beneath the paneling around the wall, right,

one of the walls. Not a good sign. Well, but here's where mistake number two comes in, Chuck, and this is a recurring theme too with these hotel fires. Everyone said, we got this, and some drunken people went and grabbed a seltzer bottle and started to try to put the fire out themselves. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to,

or rather it's easy to cast stones in the year 2018. But I imagine if I was hammered at a bar at 2.20 in the morning and I saw a little smoke and a little flame, my first reaction would probably be like, man, let's extinguish this real quick and not let me run and call the fire department, but that's exactly what you should always do is run and call the fire department.

Yeah, that's, I mean, that's what I learned from researching. This is, that's the implication. Just don't assume that you can handle any fire. That's what the fire department is there for. They're more than happy to come out to your call and deal with it. And you don't have to be embarrassed if it was just a little fire.

Sure, they'll make fun of you, but it'll be behind your back. Yeah, but this one was especially egregious because apparently from that moment that they saw those flames and smelled the smoke, it took about 15 minutes before anybody called the fire department, apparently because they were arguing over

or concerned at least over who had the authority in the hotel to call the fire department, which I don't get. There was a protocol. Like you had to be of a certain level of management, I believe, to officially call in a fire call to the fire department. See, that's nuts to me.

Yeah, I think anybody who sees a flame should be qualified to call the fire department, right? Yeah. But that was a huge, huge delay. 15 minutes in this place, as you'll see, was a big deal. And that's all that mattered, that's all it took, rather. That 15 minutes? Yeah, it was done after that.

Yeah, and they figured out pretty quickly when they ran it to tell the manager that it was on fire, after they tried that seltzer bottle thing, I think the flames just went boop, and they all ran away because they saw that this was bad. And then there was another 15 minutes on top of that. And in the meantime, this LaSalle cocktail lounge, and actually a lot of the lobby, had just been redone.

In this nicely veneered wood, and everything flammable that they could possibly come up with. And so that 15 minutes was very substantial in letting this fire really get going. Yeah, they said, hey, we have this great new bar and lounge, but we need to ventilate it, because everyone's smoking. So we're going to cut a hole in the elevator shaft. And all of a sudden, you have a chimney.

And that'll be a common thread here, is just how many big open areas, whether it be a transom window above the room doors being open, which happened a lot back then, because there wasn't air conditioning in these buildings. Yeah, it's a big point. It just really exacerbates a fire once it gets going. Yeah, and with the LaSalle in particular,

the fact that they had cut a hole, an air hole, from the place where the fire started, into a central open shaft going up into the hotel, that's one thing, but leading into this elevator shaft, there were also air holes on every floor, because these fire doors that were supposed to close off each floor from the central stairwell had been propped open to allow air to flow through better.

And then like you said, there were windows above the doors that were open a little bit, the transoms. And that was letting in air from the outside into the hotel itself. So the flames and the smoke and the fumes were able to just rise that much more quickly because of the series of little tiny decisions that individual people had made that all came together

to turn this thing into a conflagration. Yeah, and I'm not sure if it was LaSalle or one of the other ones, but they all seemed to have transoms, and they all seemed to make a big difference because they were largely open, because one of them, they found in the rooms where the transoms were closed, the fire damage wasn't so bad, but in the ones where they were open, they were just gutted.

Right, so there was a few things that happened, right? As this fire is getting really bad, the fire department starts to show up, and ultimately 300 firefighters from 61 companies showed up to this fire to fight it, which is just an enormous amount, even for back then, especially for back then. And they're not just firefighters,

they're actually people at the hotel who were working to save lives, in particular Chuck, there was a switchboard operator at the hotel who stayed on to call individual rooms, because this fire started after midnight, so most of the people in the hotel were in their rooms asleep. So this operator was calling every room

and saying there's a fire, get out of the hotel, and hang up and call the next one, and she actually died in the fire because she stayed on to call as many rooms as possible. And the fact that more people then die out of more than a thousand people, ultimately 61 died, you can basically attribute to this lady's heroism for staying on and giving her life

to tell as many people as possible that there was a fire in the hotel. Yeah, that's amazing, and she had to do that because there was no alarm system, so not even a bell ringing out. I think he said 300 firefighters, in 1946, only three of these fire units in the entire city had two-way radios, so the word couldn't get around fast enough.

In the end, they got about 60 units there, but by that time, it was just too little, too late. But the fact, like you said, I mean, this had more guests than any of the other hotels staying there, and the fact that only 61 people died out of the thousand is pretty amazing. Yeah, there was also another pair of heroes who were, I think, sailors.

They rescued 27 people between the two of them. They just kept running back into the hotel and dragging people out. Amazing. Yeah, it is amazing what something like that does to people, to some people, brings out just amazing stuff in them, you know? Yeah, so two weeks later, on June 19th, I mean, America was still sort of recovering from this news.

19 people died at the Hotel Canfield in Dubuque, Iowa, and it really was eerily similar. Like, it seemed like none of these buildings had sprinklers or alarms. They were all highly combustible. They all had these big open staircases, and the fire doors were open. Right.

And an open fire door is not a fire door. No, and I mean, like, they had, like, good fire doors, but if it's open, yeah, it's just a really easy place for smoke and fire and air to feed the fire to just move through, and at the Canfield, I think they had built onto the hotel, the hotel, and you said this was in Dubuque, Iowa, right? Yeah.

They had originally built the hotel in 1891 and then added on, and the news section was doing fairly well, but when the old section, which is where the cocktail lounge was, where the fire started, again, when that burned, like, that burned substantially, they had to tear it down afterward. And I have to correct myself.

I made fun of the LaSalle's wait staff for putting the cigarette butts into a box. No one, no one in Chicago would do something that careless. You would have to live in Dubuque to do something that careless, because it was actually at the Canfield where that fire was started like that. Yeah, there was an employee who opened that little closet,

also known as the cigarette dumping room, I guess, at the back of the lounge. By this time, the bar had emptied out, and this kid, you know, again, doesn't call immediately the fire department. He runs to find the manager, which, you know, a kid working there again, that may have been protocol,

but you're probably trained to go tell the manager of anything like that. And one William Canfield was the manager. He actually didn't call right away either. He ran to get a fire extinguisher, ran back there. Everything was fully on fire. He went, how many, how many, how many? Yeah, at that point, he knew what was going on.

And, you know, some of these people burned to death. Many of them on the upper floors were affixiated by smoke. And another recurring thing that you'll see is people jumping into nets or climbing down, sheets tied together or fire escapes. Some of them made it, some of them didn't. Yeah, I think a lot of the ones who tied their bedsheets into ropes

and shimmyed down actually did make it. But I think ultimately there were 30 people who were rescued jumping into nets. 27 were carried down by ladders. And there were 100 guests that managed to escape. I think the total number of guests who died were 19. 19 people died. So again, it could have been a lot worse

if the fire department hadn't of gotten as many people out or as many people hadn't of like, you know, made their own ropes to shimmy down. But again, this was like less than two weeks after the fire in Chicago. And two days, Chuck, again, this is making national news, these huge fires, right? People stayed in hotels.

It was like a big deal if a lot of people died in a hotel fire. Two days after the Canfield Hotel in Dubuque on June 21st, 1946, there was another fire. And this was in Dallas at the Baker Hotel. Yeah, and this one seems to be like the hotshot place to be the luxury hotel in the city. Not only did it host people from out like, you know,

highfalutin people from out of town, but they had several, you know, well-to-do restaurants and ballrooms and things. So many locals hung out here as well, like the big bands and the swing bands of the 20s and 30s would play here. But they were forced to wear Stetson hats when they did. Probably so.

This was local custom. And this was a gas explosion at this one. So it wasn't the fault of someone dumping cigarette butts or anything like that. Right. And 10 people ended up dying in this one, injured over 40. And the only reason that this one seemed to have a,

they got away lighter with the death count was that it was in a sub basement and it never fully like went through the rest of the hotel. Right. But again, this is so three fires in the month of June, 1946, claimed the lives of 90 people, one right after the other.

And this has America's attention, right? But really, the whole thing just kind of set the stage for what would be the worst hotel fire in the history of the United States that would come in December. And we'll take a break and we'll get to the Wyonkoff hotel fire after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it.

And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friends beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So we're in Atlanta, Georgia. Yeah, right.

Literally, and in the wayback machine. OK. Because this happened in Atlanta, and we briefly mentioned this in one episode a while back and said, hey, we should do an episode on that. Did we? Uh-huh. I can't remember why.

But we mentioned it, or maybe it was a listener mail or something, but here we are making good for once on a promise. Yeah, not even remembering that we'd made the promise, just stumbling backwards into fulfilling that promise. It may have been skyscrapers, because the Wineclaw Hotel in Atlanta was 15 stories high, and when it was built in 1913, it was considered a skyscraper and one of Atlanta's first.

Right. Yeah, 15 stories in 1913, that's nothing to sneeze at, especially in Atlanta too, right? Yeah, is there a website converter for how many stories that would be today? Let's see. It's 50,000 Big Macs tall. Oh, OK.

So the Wineclaw is actually still around today. It's called the Ellis Hotel now, down by Phillips Arena downtown. And back in 1946, like you said, it was a pretty swank hotel in the Atlanta area. And this was in December, December 7th. That was the fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor. And there were a pretty decent amount of people staying

in the Wineclaw that night. I think how many? Was it 1,000? No, a couple hundred, I'm sorry. It was 1,000 who were in the La Salle. But there was, I think, 300 people staying in the Wineclaw. People from out of town, a lot of them from out of town. People who were shopping for Christmas.

There was a contingent of high school kids from Rome, who were Rome Georgians. Right, much different than the Rome. Who were part of the Try High Y, which is a Christian group. And they had come because they were going to take place in a mock legislature. And then there were a lot of vets returning from World War II. There were just a lot of people hanging out in the Wineclaw

that night. Yeah, and this one, we should point out this, like so many buildings, and especially hotels at the time, were advertised as fireproof. Obviously, pre-1946 even, fires were a problem. And it was probably on people's minds. So they started things like the unsinkable Titanic and fireproof buildings.

Like, things were being touted as safe and somewhat indestructible. But by this time, Chuck, I would have been like, well, I'm staying away from that because it's basically tempting fate, apparently. Because when you call something unsinkable or fireproof, it burns to the ground or sinks. Yeah, but here's the thing.

The outside was fireproof. So I guess there was some fine print there. Because as you said, the Ellis Hotel still stands. And at the end of this horrible fire, which we're going to detail, the outside was still OK. It was the inside where all the people and stuff are that matters and was not fireproof at all. Right.

So this one, the Wineclaw Hotel Fire. Again, it's the worst hotel fire in the United States history. Hopefully, it stays that way forever. But it was started by a mystery. They still are not entirely sure what happened. But at about 3 AM on December 7, 1946, somebody, no, I'm sorry, it was the elevator operator who was traveling up and down the elevator just doing her thing.

And around the fifth floor, she noticed that she smelled smoke. So she bolts all the way down to the ground floor and runs out in the lobby and starts shouting fire. And that kicks off a series of events that are pretty substantial. Yeah, and keep in mind, this fireproof hotel, not only did it have no sprinkler system and no alarm system,

like seemingly every other building, there were no fire doors and no fire escapes. So it seemed especially fire-prone, not fireproof at all. But I wonder if they were saying, we don't even need that stuff because this building's fireproof. Maybe, but boy, I mean, they didn't think that through at all. Because, yeah, like I said, what's on the inside counts? If the inside is on fire, it doesn't matter if, like, well,

the brick's still solid, guys. Right, you know? It's still standing. The structure is. All right, so there are a couple of theories as to how this one started. There were a group of dudes there playing poker, just met up in a room to play a game of poker

or play poker all night. And they were on the third floor. Some people say that it started with a mattress in the hallway outside their suite. So someone that was in this game got ticked off, left the room, and set this mattress on fire on purpose. Yes, it's one theory. A man named Roy McCullough, who was an ex-con,

and then a con again later on, who had allegedly seen a guy who ratted him out in prison, and that he'd set the fire after he left the poker game because he was trying to kill the guy, and ended up killing 119 people. That's actually the position of a pair of journalists named Sam Hayes and Alan Goodwin, who wrote the Wineclaw Fire, a book. They very squarely placed the whole thing

on Roy McCullough's shoulders. Yeah, but that is just a theory, because other people, and the mayor of Atlanta, Mayor Hartzfield, at the time, did invite fire experts in to look it over. And I think they kind of roundly agreed that it was not some mattress set on fire deliberately, because people smelled like burning gas or tires or some weird specific smoke spell.

And they thought that there was an accelerant, and it was in another part of the hotel. It wasn't near the mattress at all. And so that would explain why the stairway went up so quickly. Well, yeah, and that was the official Atlanta Fire Department's position, that somebody had carelessly tossed a cigarette somewhere around the fourth floor stairwell, and it had gone up.

Which I mean, if that's all it takes for your hotel to go up, that's pretty bad too, you know? Yeah, and the Wineclaw, I believe, that was the one where it had the stairwell going up around the elevator shaft, right? Yes, so we have to talk about this for a second. They added a central elevator shaft, which again, can act very easily like a chimney.

And the one, the one single way up or down was in a staircase that went around the elevator shaft. So when the elevator shaft is filled with hot gases and smoke, so too is the staircase, which meant that when the bottom floors, starting around, I think, the third or fourth floor, started to catch fire, and smoke started pouring out, it went up, and everybody above those floors was trapped in the hotel.

Up to 15 floors. And when the fire department came out, they realized very quickly, and I'm sure they already knew this, the highest ladder they had could go up to 85 feet. Well, that's about eight stories. This is a 15 story building. So the people in the higher stories were really in trouble. Yeah, and inside this hotel, too,

there was a lot of poor design going on. There were a lot of hidden voids. There were false ceilings. There were places where the fire could be spreading, and no one even knows it's spreading. Again, these open lobbies and mezzanines, open stairways. The transoms really came into play again with people just getting fresh air into their rooms.

Even though they do mention air conditioning in the wine cough, but it was December, this is Atlanta. Yeah, I'm not sure why either, because, I mean, I can understand why somebody would open the window to stick their head out. But yeah, since it's cold, the transom should be shut. I don't know. Maybe fresh air.

Yeah, maybe the room was stuffy or something like that. Well, everyone was smoking, so maybe they just wanted to let out some of their cigarette smoke. Right. Or they ran out of smoke, so they were letting everybody else smoke in. That's a good point. Is it?

Sure. OK. Should we take another break? Yeah. All right, we'll talk about how most people perished and what was done about this right after this. OK. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s,

called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in,

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart

radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So the wine cough, I mean, in all these hotels, people tried to escape through fire escapes and stuff because they had them. The wine cough did not have fire escapes, like we said. So there were a lot of people tying bed sheets. They were trying to jump onto nets held by firefighters. They were trying to leap onto adjacent buildings

from lower floors. And some people just, you know, you jump because you think that's your best bet. And some of those people actually survived. Many of them died. One very sad story was one person jumped and actually survived because they landed on bodies of people that had died below them.

Yeah, it's really tough to get across what this scene, how chaotic this scene was. Like there were bodies just falling everywhere. The firefighters had nets, but people were jumping in totally uncoordinated ways. And so very frequently, there are so many people coming down that they didn't have enough nets for them all. They had to basically pick who to try to catch with their net.

There was a guy named Jimmy Cahill, I believe. He was from Albany, Georgia. And he was a hero of the wine cough fire because he escaped and ran next door to a building that shared an alley between it and the wine cough and found some painter scaffolding, like a stout board, and put it between the building next door that he'd run to, and the room where his mother was

trapped on the sixth floor of the wine cough and got her out, and started getting other people out too. And other people, including the fire department, started laying ladders down and getting people out these this way. So a lot of people escaped from going from the wine cough to the building next door.

But other people, even climbing across this 10 foot alley to the next building to safety, were getting knocked off of the ladders by people who were jumping from higher buildings. Like just total chaos, smoke everywhere, people screaming, just chaos, man. I can't, whenever my mind kind of imagines what that must have been like, it just kind of snaps back

to the present time as quick as possible. It's just tough to conceive of. Yeah, and numbers-wise, man, this is just awful. 48 people were literally burned alive. 40 people were asphyxiated by smoke and fumes. 31 people died from jumping or falling or being knocked off or shoved or whatever. And that's the total number, what was it, 119 total?

And then 39 of those 119 people were under 20. And I think a lot of them were those kids there for the Makka delegation or whatever. Yeah, yeah. It's super, super sad. And the good news is, out of all of this, it's sad that it took this, but after this spate of fires, the government finally was like,

we've got to do something here. Because people are just, it seems like left and right, dying in hotel fires. Yeah, and what's sad is, there were people who had already been writing all of these recommendations of best practices. There's the life safety code from the National Fire Protection Association.

Had basically been saying, here's what you gotta do. It's not like we didn't know how to prevent losses of life in hotel fires. It's just that people weren't making hotel operators do these things. And so these fire policies stayed local. So it's still, to this day, a patchwork of regulations in a lot of ways.

But these little towns and cities were so affected by these fires in 1946 that they started adopting these policies, including things like, you got a hotel, you got to have a fire sprinkler system. That was one, a fire alarm system. I mean, really low-hanging fruit, but that a lot of hotels just didn't have at the time.

Suddenly they were forced to. Yeah, fire doors were required then, pretty much everywhere. They were required to be closed at all times. Those transoms, those Troubleson transoms that admittedly I think are great in love. They were basically prohibited from that point on. Fresh air, air conditioning or no,

they said no more transoms. Right. And then fire escapes, of course, were mandated pretty much everywhere. Yeah, and if you look around, like if you're in an office building or something, you ever go down the stairwell, like it's totally unadorned.

It's concrete and metal and it's painted. There's nothing, there's no art, there's no carpet, there's no fake plants, there's nothing there. And the reason why is because that stairwell is meant to prevent fire from getting any further. There's nothing to burn. And a lot of that is because of these 1946 fires and the changes in the code.

It changed like a fire door. It's a self-closing door, it's a heavy door. It's meant to be that way. And it says like doors to remain closed at all times. All of that came out of this. And there used to be a big debate over whether existing hotels would be grandfathered in anytime the code was updated.

And that was the custom of the land. And again, these 1946 hotel fires changed that. It was, if you have a hotel and you're doing business, you have to retroactively add a fire sprinkler system now. Yeah, and Truman, President Truman the following year got involved and specifically called for a national conference on fire prevention. So while, I don't think there were any federal regulations,

like you said, it was still local. They did change a lot of the like national and federal building codes at least. Yes, and I think it is still that way to this day. It's localities that are responsible for fire codes, right? Yeah, and I think there's been ever since then an eye on design and safety.

Whereas back then it was just like, let's make this the most beautiful thing. I mean, I think in that first Chicago fire, didn't they even test the paneling and found that the oak paneling that they used was like five times more flammable than just regular oak paneling because it was coated with this special thing to make it look pretty.

Right, like the veneer I think they used was really, really flammable, absolutely. There was that MGM fire in 1980 that was so bad. It came decades after these reforms were made. I don't remember that, was that Vegas? Yeah, it was a big deal. Like it was on TV while it was happening. There's footage of like people in the higher floors

like hanging out of their window and stuff. And there were a lot of people in the hotel at this time. 85 people died. I think seven of those were hotel employees. But it could have been way, way worse, but the reason it was as bad as it was, again, 119 is the worst hotel fire in American history. This was 85, so it was pretty close to as bad as it gets.

But the reason why it was as bad as it was is because the people who built the MGM Grand like balked at the cost of adding a sprinkler system when they built it. And the people in Vegas who were overseeing the fire code and enforcing it gave them a pass because they were just glad that the MGM Grand was building there.

And I think the fire sprinkler system would have cost less than $200,000 to build in and they just didn't do it until after. Yeah, exactly. That's, yeah, that's what I mean. Like that's 1930s stuff, not 1980s stuff. Look right above us, buddy. You see that little fire sprinkler?

Yeah, I know. Now it's like cool to show your fire sprinklers and the piping and all that. Forget your job ceilings. Yeah. It's all about open floor plants. Which by the way, Chuck, I'm seeing more and more like of the steady drum beat against open floor plants

is like the worst idea anyone's ever had as far as office spaces go. Oh, really? Yeah, how they're just attention killers. It's not like, I mean, you know that. Like how often do I pester you and bother you just because I can like lean back and be like, hey, Chuck.

I'm shooting a spitball. All right, but they're so distracting. And I predict they're gonna be gone in the next couple of years. Yeah, I don't know man, remember like back to the high cubes or offices? I think it's, I don't know. I have no prediction actually.

I was gonna say, I think it's just gonna be more working from home and probably it will, but I don't think we're done with offices yet. So I don't know what's coming next. I went in an office building last week that had those really tall cubes that we used to be in back in the day. And it was weird.

It was like, man, I remember, I don't know. I didn't like it. There was something about someone poking their head above the wall. Gophering? Yeah, it was what it was called. I think so, yeah. I don't know.

I never liked that. I prefer to see my enemies coming. So I think I like the open thing. That's right. Yeah, you did used to be a lot more jumpy with those high cubes. Man, I hated them. You got anything else?

Yeah, one more thing. There's a very famous photograph from the Weinkoff fire that won a young Georgia Tech student a Pulitzer Prize in 1947. He was a PhD student named Arnold Hardy. And he lived kind of close by. He was on his way back from dancing, heard about this fire, called and found out where it is because he fancied himself a kind of amateur photographer,

grabbed his camera, took a cab over there and was the first photographer on the scene and took a very famous photo of a 41-year-old secretary named Daisy McCumber in mid-fall from this building. Her dress is blown up and her 1940s pantaloons are showing and it's really a creepy picture. He ended up selling the rights to the AP for 300 bucks. They tried to hire him as a photographer,

their Atlanta guy and he refused. And apparently too, and this is not well known, there was a drugstore across the street named Lanes that was closed and they needed supplies, like emergency medical supplies and people were waiting on the owner to show up and open it and Hardy himself kicked in the door, ended up getting arrested for disorderly conduct,

but the drugstore dropped the charges even though they made him pay for the door. Which he paid for with his photo proceeds. I guess, but apparently they, like at least in Atlanta, local police were then required to have medical supplies in their cars for the first time. And he always felt bad.

I don't know if this is still true, but as of a couple of years ago, his granddaughter worked at Twain's in Decatur. Oh yeah. And she kind of kept his memory alive. He died in 2007 and said that he was always kind of conflicted that he got this recognition and this Pulitzer Prize from such a tragedy.

So did Daisy die? She lived. Okay. Although it was hard to find her because apparently I don't know if it was because it was, you know, her underwear was showing, but, and it was the 1940s, she never came out and was like, that's me.

She would deny that it was her, but they eventually found out that it was Daisy McCumber and she did live. Huh. Well, that's good. I'm glad she lived at least. Very interesting. I've got one more thing. So with the Wyonkov Hotel fire, when they showed up,

it was a one alarm fire when they called. And I was like, what is that? What does that mean? And a one alarm fire, two alarm fire, whatever. So apparently the alarm is the number of firefighters and equipment that are brought out. It's the number of units, right? Yeah. Or the number of people and it varies by municipality.

So for example, and like I found in Louisville, Kentucky, a one alarm fire is 20 firefighters, five trucks and two commanders. And then with each alarm, that number doubles, right? So when the Atlanta fire department showed up on the scene, it was a one alarm fire. And like right when they got there, the chief turned it into a two and then three alarm fire.

And then within another 15 minutes, they turned into four alarm fire. And by, I think an hour or so after this fire had started, they were calling firefighters who were off duty from other cities, basically anyone who could get there fast enough and their fire truck came out to fight this fire. Wow. It was a big one.

Okay. And that's it. That's all I've got for hotel fires. I got nothing else. Well, if you want to know more about hotel fires, you can search those terms on the internet because I don't think how stuff works has anything about it, but that's okay because I said search bar, which means it's time for listener mail.

This is, I'm going to call this. Um, good job. That's my Monica Sellis. Okay. I was listening to how board breaking works guys and you got into a conversation on women's tennis and the shrieking and the yelling and wondering about Steffi Graff or Monica Sellis.

You also mentioned Monica Sellis was stabbed. This is where my useless knowledge comes in guys. Most women tennis players do shriek and I would personally, this Chuck speaking, I think most men do too, right? Mm-hmm. I hear a lot of grunting. Sure.

But he says Monica Sellis was the one that really had a very loud and high shriek. So loud in fact that many of her opponents would complain during the match and she would actually get warnings from the chair umpire. They would even measure how loud her shriek was. I didn't know that. Yeah, that seems weird.

Another interesting thing to me is that when Monica Sellis was stabbed in the back, she was court side on the court side change resting in her chair. The person who stabbed her was not a fan. He was a Steffy Graff fan who was worried that Sellis would beat her record. Oh my gosh.

I know. You believe that? Did you see the movie about who was it? Nancy Kerry, Tonya Harding. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, basically I didn't realize that it happened in tennis as well.

Did you see that movie? Yeah. It was good, huh? It was, it was very good. I was surprised that she humanized Tonya Harding so well. You know that was locally made? No, that was obviously made in Oregon, basically. No, like the Golden Buddha,

Chinese restaurant indicators there. Okay, yeah, I thought, I was like, is that, is the Golden Buddha a chain? Because I think I've eaten at that one. Yeah, okay, you're right. I did notice that. And we had quite a few of the old stuff you should know crew members worked on it.

Awesome. Yeah, it was cool. So anyway, back to the email. Monica Sellis was very young, just starting her career off and Steffy had already been playing for a while. Monica had been on a tear and was starting to beat Steffy Graff

because of the stabbing incident, the professional tennis tour, increased security protocol. If you watch tennis on TV today, you will see that there are always security on the court during the changeovers. The security guard actually will stand behind the tennis player, facing the crowd.

And that is from Raul Rodriguez in Topeka, Kansas. Nice, thank you. Raul or Raul? R-A-U-L. Raul Rodriguez, thank you. From Topeka, huh? Topeka, Kansas. Holding it down.

Well, thanks a lot, Raul and everybody out there in Topeka, Kansas for listening to us. And wherever you are, you can hang out with us on the social medias. And by the way, I'm well aware that media is, medias is not the plural of medium. You know, that media is plural itself.

I'm just kidding, so lighten up. Someone said that and I was like, was it jokes, sir? Yeah, so if you wanna hang out with us on social medias, now I'm just saying it out of spite. You can go to stuffyshineau.com, find all that stuff there, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast

at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. And we'll see ya. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. On to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.