Is the poor working conditions a reason more people didn’t survive?
Why were there no fire drills? If there were fire drills, better working conditions, and no fire hazards in that shirtwaist building, could the fire been prevented? No one knows what caused the fire, but, could this be the cause of the traumatic fire?
There were many dreadful fire hazards. Such as, lawn material that burned as easy as gasoline. The lawn was 120 layers thick. That is 120 layers of material that burns as easy as gasoline. The doorways were so small that only one person could go through at one time to prevent people from stealing, people left piles of shirtwaists on the floor so during the fire, everyone was falling over them and …show more content…
There were 228 sewing machines on one floor. Even though smoking was against the rules, people did it anyways. That could of been the cause of the fire. “Every two months or so, a rag dealer took away a ton of scraps, paying about seven cents a pound. The last pickup was in January” (Marrin lines 7-11). The fire was March 25th. There were piles and piles of scraps all around. The workers had a line of scraps above their …show more content…
The elevator doors were impossible to open. There were no fire drills. How would people know what to do if there was a fire? Well there was one. A dreadful one.
“I reached out and grabbed the cable, wrapped my legs around them, and started to slide down. While on my way down, as slow as I could let myself drop, the bodies of six girls went rolling past me. One of the struck me, and I fell on top of the elevator. I fell on the dead body of a girl” (Marrin lines 112-117). Samuel said that. He made it out alive. It wasn’t that case for others.
“In the days following the fire, city officials sifted through the charred rubble at the Asch Building and tried to fix the fault for the tragedy” (Kent lines 1-3). They inspected they awful, filthy working conditions the workers used to be forced to work in. As a result, thirty-three new labor laws got