Liberty Hose Co. No. 2 - On This Day...

Around 9:30 a.m. on March 4, 1908, the Lake View Elementary School, in Collinwood, Ohio, caught fire. The fire was caused by an overheated steam pipe in contact with a wooden floor joist in the basement. The school was built with load bearing masonry outer walls, but the three-story building used wooden joists and floors. The building?s main stair case extended from the front doors of the building, up to the third floor. The fire started in the basement, near the front door. There were no fire doors in the stairwells, and the they acted like a chimney, helping to spread the fire quickly. Oiled wooden hall and classroom floors also fueled the fire. There were 310 students in the school at the time. The younger ones were on the upper floors. Most students on first floor escaped, believing the ringing fire gong was a fire drill, they escaped in an orderly fashion. The students on the upper floors were taught to exit the building from the front door. As they approached it, the flames were about them and they panicked and rushed to the door. This caused a crush of students in the stairwells. Some realized the exit was blocked and attempted to go back up the stairs, only to be pushed back down into the flames by the onrush of students. Those that weren't killed by the crush were trapped there and died from smoke inhalation or were burned by the fire. Other students tried to escape from a back door, but the door was locked, and they met the same fate as those who died at the front door. Other students died after trying to escape by jumping from second and third floor windows. Hundreds of rescuers arrived but could save very few because of the dense jam at the foot of the stairs. Eventually the doors burned enough so that they collapsed from the weight of the students behind them, and revealed the horrific scene to the crowd of onlookers and rescuers. Some of the students were alive at that time and their parents, who by now were at the school, rushed to save them. But they could not be removed due to the weight of the tangled bodies above them. The parents were eventually forced to leave their side as they received serious burns on their hands and faces. Some of the students near the top of the heap at the back door were rescued after its collapse. It was over almost before the frantic mothers who gathered outside realized their children were lost. The volunteer fire company had responded to the scene, but lacked sufficient water pressure to send streams of water into the second floor and ladders tall enough to reach the third floor. The fire spread so rapidly, that within minutes of its discovery, the school was nothing but blackened walls surrounding a cellar full of small corpses and debris. The greater number of the little bodies taken from the building were burned beyond recognition. In all 172 students between the ages of 6 and 14 died in the fire. Two teachers and one rescuer also died. The coroner had many bodies that could not be identified and many hands and feet that had been burned off. These were eventually buried in a common grave. Some of the families of the dead students also chose to bury their children near the mass grave. Following the fire, the remains of the Lake View School were demolished and a memorial garden planned for the site. A new school, Collinwood Memorial Elementary School, was built adjacent to the disaster site. It was torn down in 2004. A memorial plaque remains on the site. The disaster led to a national effort to change doors at public buildings so that they opened outward, and made "panic bar" latches on doors required in all schools.