Fighting Fire With Knowledge

There are few recruiting slogans more nobly eloquent than the New York City Fire Department’s “Heroes Wanted.” And I suspect historian Peter Hoffer, author of “Seven Fires” (Public Affairs Press, 480 pages, $27.50), agrees. His new book briskly integrates the progress of American firefighting over three centuries into broader questions of urban planning, real estate development, public finance, and social justice.As Mr. Hoffer points out, the cost of fire protection is more than the taxes spent on firefighters and fire trucks: It’s hidden in the expenses of enforcing compliance with fire, building, and zoning laws. What rents will we pay to live in truly fireproof housing? What restrictions on development are acceptable to create neighborhoods safe from fires?After an introduction citing London’s Great Fire of 1666 as the seminal Anglo-American urban fire experience, Mr. Hoffer describes seven major American conflagrations from 1760 to 2001. He sketches the background to each fire, including building materials and techniques that set the stage for the disaster, defective firefighting practices that permitted the fire’s spread, and the short-term and long-term effects.Thus, the failure of Boston’s aristocratic and wealthy merchant rulers to enforce primitive building codes was perhaps more to blame for Boston’s fire of 1760 than the ineffectual, ill-trained, and poorly equipped volunteer firefighters.The same city fathers failed in their tactless treatment of the newly destitute working poor whose homes and tools had been lost to the flames. These shortcomings led to the rise to power of a new class: prosperous artisans. Mr. Hoffer notes that the men who served as volunteer firefighters later enrolled in the Sons of Liberty under the leadership of their fire wardens including Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who thought nothing of using their familiarity with fire control techniques to demolish political opponents’ homes and warehouses.The great fires of 1845 in Pittsburgh and 1871 in Chicago (the ” best -known conflagration in our nation’s history”) swiftly led to profitable redevelopment. Mr. Hoffer notes one distinction in each city’s responses to the fire: Chicago’s newspapers blamed their city’s fire on the supposed moral failings of the immigrant working class. He also points out that a new building code requiring expensive fireproof brick and stone in all new housing led to political upheaval: workers, who could only afford to buy houses built from cheap, albeit inflammable, pine, felt they were being deprived of their right to own a home.His description of the Baltimore fire of 1904, in which supposedly fireproof buildings were gutted one after another, is enriched by heavy use of contemporary newspaper coverage as well as H.L. Mencken’s memoirs of covering the disaster as the 27-year old city editor of the Baltimore Herald. Mencken was burned out of three office buildings in rapid succession and had to print his paper on the presses of the Washington Post.More modern fires seem to leave Mr. Hoffer occasionally nonplussed. In particularly, the Detroit fires of 1967 – essentially riots featuring widespread arson with gunfire aimed at the firefighters – led to the collapse of Detroit’s political order through white flight and the rise of racist demagogues such as Coleman Younger, whose mayoralty so politicized the Detroit Fire Department that it became incompetent at fighting fires. Mr. Hoffer’s description of Devil’s Night – the night before Halloween, when youth gangs roam Detroit to set hundreds of private houses on fire just for the fun of it – leaves one in despair for a once-great city.By contrast, the 1991 Oakland Hills, Ca., brushfires destroyed the mansions of wealthy suburbanites. Yet any attempt by the local government to restrict subsequent use of attractive but inflammable building materials raised massive, well-funded protests. Mr. Hoffer writes that Oakland’s builders are now recreating the environment that led to the wildfires in the first place.He concludes with a stirring description of the New York City Fire Department’s heroic, if ill-planned, response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. After recapitulating the subsequent criticisms of city disorganization and mismanagement of its response to the disaster, Mr. Hoffer writes a remarkably persuasive analysis of the World Trade Center’s construction, layout, and building materials. He suggests that the September 11th fires were not so much traditional urban high-rise conflagrations as something comparable to suburban brushfires, such as those the fire department fights on Staten Island. Mr. Hoffer suggests the National Parks Service’s experience in fighting fires in national parks might prove a sound model for revamping New York City’s methods of controlling future fires in modern high-rises.A serious book written by a serious man, “Seven Fires” is honest, well written, and well argued. It should be force-fed to the policymakers, urban planners, and architects who implement building codes and fire prevention policies and who budget for fire departments.Mr. Bryk last wrote for these pages about late 19th-century Chicago.

Fighting Fire With Knowledge

Fighting Fire With Knowledge

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