Chicago Burns, October 8, 1871 (Wikipedia Photo) |
Most Chicagoans
recognize the significance of the year 1871.
The second red star in Chicago’s city flag memorializes that year, the
year that the city burned to the ground in a 36-hour fire that destroyed over
17,000 buildings and left a third of the city’s population without a place to
sleep.
One would think
that in a city built almost completely of cheap and readily available lumber
during a drought of unprecedented proportions, authorities would have gone out
of their way to keep disaster at bay.
But when Matthias Schaffer spotted the fire at 9:00 p.m. on the evening
of October 8, the city was ill prepared for the horrors that would unfold over
the next 36 hours.
It’s always easy to
look back at events and see how things would have changed if different
decisions had been made. It’s easy, and
It’s unfair to those who were meeting events as they unfolded in real time.
Still, the other
day I was looking through a Chicago
Tribune article that ran on this date, June 2, of 1871, a piece that
provided the deliberations of the city’s common council on the previous
evening. One piece of business caught my
attention . . .
FIRE
ALARM TELEGRAPH
A communication was received from the Board
of Fire Commissioners, with a communication from E. P. Chandler, Superintendent
of the Fire Alarm Telegraph, calling attention to the fact that no estimate had
been made by the Finance Committee for the necessary expense of the fire alarm
telegraph for the current year. The
communication further set forth that a reduction of the repairing corps by one
man was unwise, and undesirable.
The report was referred to the Finance
Committee, with instructions to report why no appropriation had been
recommended.
Here was a city
about to burn to the ground, a wooden city, a doomed city, at the beginning of
a summer’s-long drought, and no appropriation had been made to find a way to
fund the system that would . More than that, the
staff upon which the system depended had apparently been reduced in size.
Like I said at the
beginning of this little piece, it’s easy to sit back and criticize, especially
easy in this case given the magnitude of the disaster that would unfold four
months later.
Yet, how much
different are we from the penny-pinching, shortsighted members of the 1871
Chicago common council? With reports
that almost daily inform us that Miami will be underwater in a century or so or
that the traders on Wall Street will be wearing wet suits and fins to work in
that amount of time, we keep doing what we have always done, hoping that the
unthinkable will not occur.
Human nature, I
guess. Refer it to committee.
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