HOTEL FIRE PANIC.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9153, 28 July 1908, Page 3

HOTEL FIRE PANIC.

GUESTS PERISH AT WINDOW.

..America has been furnished with yet another object lesson in the folly of tolerable "fire-traps" in big towns by the total destruction of the Aveline Hotel at Fort Wayne on May 4th with the loss of thirty lives. Of the seventy-four guests who were sleeping when the hotel caught fire, not one escaped without injury. In an instant all the means of exit by way of stairs and elevators were cut off, and tha guests, men and women, were compelled either to leap from the windows or to remain and be suffocated to death. When, after much delay, the Fire Brigade arrivedjf every window was crowded with maddened, panic-slrieken people. Ladders were raised, and some thirty persons reached safely with their aid. Mr Sallot, a New York merchant, had a marvellous escape. He crawled to a narrow ledge, and, though almosc suffocated and blinded by smoke, succeeded in walking a few steps, wheii.out of the darkness he heard a voice saying, "Jump, brother." He jumped and landed on tha roof of a neighbouring building. Mr John HenJricks, manager of a local basebill club, oWed his life to his wife's p of a gladstone, bag. The couple placed the open bag over their heads and shoulders', and made a way through a sea of flames to the ground fli.ir, where the firemen extricated them in a badly burned condition. Eleven charred bodies were at once recovered, and over a score were, buried beneath the ruins. All the guests lost their clothes and other belongings, one mourning the destruction of a' collection of paintings valu id at £5.000. Owing to the destruction'of the; hotel registers the idantity of the victims cannot be established. Tha coroner declared that thara was a neglect of proper tions, and that tha building was constructedNviiih disregard of all proper rul&a. ~,.,