General Slocum

The General Slocum disaster was the second most deadly fire in U.S. history. It killed 1,021 people in New York on June 15, 1904.

It happened in what was called Kleindeutchland, or Little Germany, on the Lower East Side. This enclave teemed with German immigrants who had been arriving there since the 1840s. St. Mark's Lutheran church, one of the churches in the area, held an annual event to celebrate the end of the Sunday school year. They usually rented a boat named General Slocum to take them to a nearby facility for a day of games and food. More than 1,300 people boarded the boat that fateful day.

A short while after the boat left the dock, smoke started coming out of a storage room. Crewmen tried putting the fire out, but because no one trained them to handle fire drills, they failed to extinguish the blaze and reported the emergency to Captain William Van Schaick ten minutes later. The captain basically panicked and, instead of docking the boat at a nearby spot, raced to North Brother Island a mile away. He did this because he feared the oil tanks situated at the nearby locations might have prompted an even greater disaster with the raging fire, even though onlookers shouted for him to dock it there.

The speed of the boat only fanned the flames, however, and passengers began jumping overboard or clinging onto parts of the boat not yet overtaken by the fire. And to make matters worse, nothing that could have halted the situation was able to work in the first place. The crew was inexperienced, the 3,000 life jackets were corked and disintegrated, the lifeboats were too firmly wired in place, and the hoses burst when the water was turned on. Plus, most of the kids who jumped off the boat could not swim, so many of them drowned. When the boat touched shore at North Brother Island, a team of onlookers and nearby nurses attempted to help the people still onboard. The rescue boats did all in their power but could only save the few who did not already drown.

In the aftermath Van Schaick and executives of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Co. were indicted, but the jury found Van Schaick the easy scapegoat. The judge sentenced him to 10 years of hard labor for criminal negligence and manslaughter. The Knickerbocker Steamboat Co. suffered only a minor fine, even though the trial revealed they falsified records on the true safety of the boat. But four months later a commission issued a damning report on the lack of common sense used on the construction of the General Slocum. People were fired and President Roosevelt instituted new regulations for all steamboats to have:

- fireproof metal bulkheads to contain fires
- steam pipes extended from the boiler into cargo areas (to act as a sprinkler)
- improved lifejackets (one for each passenger and crew member)
- fire hoses capable of handling 100 pounds of pressure per square inch
- accessible life boats

President Taft pardoned Captain William Van Schaick on this day in 1912.