session a month prior to the disaster in which inspectors barely skimmed the safety equipment and life preservers. Both parties benefited from this, for the boat’s captain, William Van Schaick, found it almost insulting to have someone question his ability to transport his passengers safely. As for the inspectors, the more boats they looked at, the more money they made. O’Donnell provides further insight into the public’s attitude toward consumer safety. The “Buyer Beware” attitude was still dominant, but it was changing as preventable accidents claimed more and more lives. Safety standard laws were passed but not greatly enforced — showing that laws and regulations are useless when disregarded by untouchable civil-servant inspectors. Still, steamboats were considered the safest means of travel, causing fewer deaths annually than railroads. The catastrophic fire began, in a storage room full of hay, a few minutes after the steamboat had set off up the East River — and from there, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The crew proved incompetent, and the purely nominal safety plans were futile. The water hoses did not work, and the decades-old life preservers virtually disintegrated once opened or in the water. O’Donnell’s depiction of the course of events — from the fire’s start to the landing of steamboat nearly 20 minutes later — is impressive. O’Donnell captures the terror. Since he has done such a good job of resurrecting the personalities aboard that day, the reader is in suspense wondering their fates. You’re relieved when you find out someone — usually a younger person or child — could swim, since the great majority did not know how. (The city had just recently opened some public swimming pools.) One girl’s escape is etched in my memory: Without her realizing it, the intense heat had seared her right hand to the melted railing paint. With all her might she tore herself free and jumped, leaving behind a large patch of skin and her dreams of one day becoming a pianist. Ship Ablaze is not a cheery book,tomsoutletsaleonlinecheap.com, and it can be an overwhelming read at times as you helplessly witness the destruction. But the details are neither overly gruesome nor exaggerated. O’Donnell’s explanations enable you to take a step back from time to time and look at the chaos objectively. The story would be unbearable otherwise. Fire, O’Donnell, explains, was feared by the residents living in the cramped, hazardous conditions of the tenements. Yet it was also their source of light, heat, and life. In a cruel irony, the same force they avoided every day was eventually to cause their demise. The trapped passengers had to jump into the boiling water below the steamboat or confront devouring flames. The heroic medical personnel and volunteers who received the dead and wounded on the shores of the East River could do little to save the badly wounded or to comfort the survivors. The comparisons to September 11 are obvious. A passage about a policeman jumping into a boat to row out to help could easily be a firemen running into the burning World Trade Center towers. Whole families were lost on that boat. Men came home from work and no longer had wives and children. A neighborhood lost a large segment of its population. Clergymen of all denominations from all over the city came to assist a flock of people whose church had lost its entire leadership and many members of its congregation. Charitable organizations and relief funds supplied money for the massive number of funerals and for the orphaned children. The generous donations to the relief fund set up by then-mayor George McClellan Jr,Toms Shoes Outlet Sale. were unprecedented, as this kind of charity was not the Victorian-era norm. Again reminiscent of September 11, one reporter at the time remarked: “Never again will I believe our city has no heart.” Unfortunately, complaints about unequal disbursements arose then as well,toms shoes online, and soured relationships. Some families claimed to have received no (or not enough) help; there was also fighting over where the surplus funding should go Related articles:

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