Essay On Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

590 Words3 Pages

One of the most remembered and most infamous incidents in American industrial history was the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory. On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory burned, which killed 145 workers in New York City. The incident was always remembered and studied for years as in this case the deaths of these 145 employees could be prevented. Most of the employees died due to neglect of occupational safety features and also due to locked doors within the factory building. Max Blanck and Isaac Harris owned the Triangle factory, in the highest three floors of the Asch building in Manhattan. It was an actual sweatshop, commissioning adolescent immigrant women who worked in a cramped space with sewing machines. Almost all the workers were teenaged girls who did not speak any English, who worked 12 hours a day every single day of the week. During the year of the …show more content…

There were two stairways down to the street, although one was locked from the outside in order to avoid stealing from the factory and the other single opened inward. Another issue was that the fire escape was so thin that meant it would have taken hours for all the workers to use it, even during the best of situations and in this case it wasn’t the best of circumstances. The day of the fire it was a Saturday afternoon on March 25th. The day of the fire there were 600 workers at the factory when it started by a rag bin. The manager on duty tried to use the fire hose to destroy it, but failed, as the hose was decayed and its valve was tarnished to