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How Did The Conditions That Led To The Great Chicago Fire?

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The city is burning! People are through the streets and screams fill the air.The O’Leary house is burning and the fire will soon spread throughout the city of Chicago. The main conditions that led to the Great Chicago Fire were the wooden sidewalks and roads, the unusually hot summer, and small lot sizes in the poorer districts. The first condition that led to the Great Chicago Fire were the wooden sidewalks and roads.In paragraph 12, the text states, over 55 miles of pine-block streets and 600 miles of wooden sidewalks bound the 23,000 acres of the city in a highly combustible knot.The city was built and covered in heavy amounts of wood, pine, and knot, which are highly flammable objects. This could have led to the fire being more easily …show more content…

In paragraph 13, the author stated , “the summer had been unusually dry. Between July and October only a few scattered showers had taken place and did not produce much water at all.”. A severe drought could have led to this fire. An area suffering from drought is more likely to have a fire because the environment is dry and has no moisture which can make dried leaves and sticks the perfect fuel. Also, in paragraph 13, the author writes, “What made Sunday different and particularly dangerous was the steady wind blowing in from the southwest. The steady wind gave the fire legs, and helped it move from area to area in the city of Chicago. The second condition that led to the great Chicago Fire was the unusually hot summer and the current weather, which contributed to the fire and its …show more content…

In these residential areas were a variety of businesses—paint factories, lumberyards, distilleries, gasworks, mills, furniture manufacturers, warehouses, and coal distributors.”. In these districts the maximum of most lot sizes were 100 feet, even though the spaces were small there were many businesses like lumber yards, distilleries, and warehouses built out of highly flammable wood.The last condition that contributed to the Great Chicago Fire was small lot sizes in the poorer district,.causing many small buildings to be caught in the flames and spreading

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