But if I understand Hinsdale, the problem was that alarms were ignored, not that the fire was ignored. Had they responded to the alarms the damage would've been reduced.
In the case of 1975 Second Ave, IIRC the NYT articles, there were several people working in the building and they caught it.
Given the vast number of telco buildings, I think they're record is pretty good. The issue is fire prevention as much as fighting. I don't know if they ever found the cause of the NYC fire.
Question: In looking through the Archives at the NYC brochure, is there any way to page through quickly each separate frame? The only way I saw is to manually change the page number in the address bar.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You are correct on that, Lisa. Regards Hinsdale, 'catching the alarm' was left to clerks in Springfield, IL a couple hundred miles away who chose to simply ignore it. When the weekend duty-supervisor in Chicago got in their car, drove out to Hinsdale, saw the smoke pouring out of the windows, tried to use the phones to call the Fire Department, discovered the phones all dead they went out on the street _and asked a passer-by to 'call the fire department from some other phone'. We will give that passer-by credit and assume they attempted to call from some payphone somewhere around town, but _found it dead also by that time_. Finally, when several more minutes had passed with no fire department arrival, the supervisor then got in their own car and drove to the fire station.I will suggest that even a minimum-wage clerk who was paid to sit in the office and do data-entry work in a lacsidaisical way while watching television or otherwise screwing around that day (and making rounds of the facilities every hour or two [maybe while on the way to the employee kitchen to get another sandwhich or can of cola out of the fridge] would have smelled the smoke, muttered 'WTF!' to no one in particular and called both the Fire Department and the responsible supervisor on the phone and the job would have been handled _much quicker and less expensively_ than it turned out ... then he would have finished his sandwhich and can of cola and gone back to his/her data entry work for the rest of the afternoon. And most of that employee's payroll costs would get charged back to the data-entry department or whoever.
Springfield chose to first ignore the alarm, saying, "Well, it had been raining and windy all day, that alarm had 'falsed' a couple times already that day and Chicago had told us not to trouble them with a bunch of false alarms like that." So much for the false economy of an alarm system no one pays attention to. PAT]