Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 January 1908 — 100 KILLED IN PANIC AT CHURCH BENEFIT [ARTICLE]

100 KILLED IN PANIC AT CHURCH BENEFIT

Blaze Follows Explosion and Women and Children Are Trampled to Death. CORPSES • BLOCK STAIRWAY. Overturned Oil Lamps Feed Flames and Farce Trapped. Audience to Jump from Windows. One hundred persons were killed anil seventy-five were seriously Injured, many of whom will* die, in a fire and panic which followed the explosion of a moving picture machine at a church entertainment in the Rhodes Opera House in Boyertoo, Pa., Monday evening. Most of the dead and injured are women and children, and the catastrophe has thrown the little town of 2,500 inhabitants into the deepest grief. Scarcely a family but has lost some member. The opera house, a two-story structure on the main street of the town, was filled to overflowing by a benefit for St. John’s Lutheran Church. The feature of the program was a series of moving pictures. Most of the audience were women and children.

Giant Tank Kxplodea. Suddenly, In the midst of the entertainment, the acetylene tank which furnished light for the moving picture machine exploled. Instantly the whole interior of the opera house was filled with flames.

The actors endeavored to quiet the audience, but in their anxiety to make themselves heard and to avoid the awful stampede of the women and children, the coal oil lamps which were used at the footlights were overturned, setting the place on fire. The flames, fed by oil, shot almost to the ceiling, and there was a rush of the several hundred persons to escape from the burning building. Scores of women and children were trampled on and several who escaped being burned io death died after being dragged from the opera house. In some cases, it is said, entire families have been wiped out. The scene which followed the explosion is indescribable.

-Section of the Floor Gives Way. Following the explosion there was a wild rush of the audience for the stairway, the one means of exit. A score of persons reached the stairway simultaneously, and it was jammed so full of struggling humanity that only a few reached the outer air. In the mad rush a section of the floor gave way, precipitating scores of persons to the basement. As the floor collapsed the shrieks of the helpless persons who were carried down were heard for blocks. The interior of the opera house was of wood and plaster, and the flimsy carpentry that made the stage and Its fittings furnished excellent material for the flames. Within two minutes after the explosion occurred thfi entire building was a mass of flames. The jamming of people In the stairway blocked that means of egress, and dozens of frantic women and children leaped from the front window to the Btone pavement below. Not one of these escaped broken limbs, and they are practically all of tbe Injured, Inasmuch as those inside the opera house perished.

Only Fire Engine Disabled. To make matters worse, the one fire engine in Boyertown is disabled, and there was no means of fighting the fire. It Is almost certain that all of the bodies of the victims were cremated, and the hopes of Identifying any of them are destroyed. Fire engines were sent to the scene from Reading- and Pottstown, but they arrived too lata to be of any service further than to save surrounding property. Requests for assistance were quickly sent to Pottstown and Reading, and special trains bearing surgeons and nurses were hurried there. These surgeons, assisted by local physicians. Improvised hospitals in near-by residence! and stores, and gave what aid waa possible to the injured. At the foot of the narrow stairway, which was Jammed full of dead and dying, scores of victims could be seen frpm the street Dozens of men tried to reach them, and succeeded in carrying a few of them out, hut the heat of the fire soon drove them back. Then, as the flames ate their way down the stairway and reached them, the bodies were cremated in the Tery sight of tboae who would have carried them out