Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 December 1907 — SKYSCRAPER MENACE. [ARTICLE]

SKYSCRAPER MENACE.

What a Conflagration Among These Cliff Dwellers Would Mean. A catastrophe that will eclipse the destruction of San Francisco is the cheering prospect offered for the contemplation as New York by the president of the board of fire underwriters, says Collier’s Weekly. And it is not New York alone that is threatened, but evdry great city, that permits the construction of skyscrapers. The underwriters think that there is not only a possibility but a very strong probability of a blaze starting in the top stories of a nest of these aerial hives and leaping across the canyons that separate them, raging aloft like a fire in the upper branches of a forest, and sweeping unchecked out of reach of the helpless firemen in the street. When office buildings go higher than the Washington monument all the ordinary methods of protection become obsolete. No hose can carry a stream half way to their roofs. No street mains can furnish pressure enough to send water up in standpipes. Of course there are satisfactory methods of supplying the upper floors in ordinary times, but they would count for nothing in a conflagration. The experience of San Francisco has shown, in the opinion of President Babb, that “so-called ‘fireproof buildings cannot withstand the attack of a wave of flame.” If a fire should sweep the financial district of New York it would 'cause a loss of from one to two billion dollars; the insurance companies would be hard pressed to pay 20 to 25 cents on the dollar, title guaranty companies, mortgage concerns, savings banks, and all other financial institutions would suffer, and the City would feel at once the loss of revenue from the destruction of taxable values. Another menace that bangs oyer the skyscraper districts of great cities' is the danger of panic. It is said that if a sudden shock should send the swarming cliff dwellers all surging to the streets at once the highways would not hold the human flood. The streets of our cities were designed to match buildings three or four stories high. When ten such buildings are piled one on top of another, and the same thoroughfares are expected to accommodate the people from all of them, the results are likely to be startling.