SS Noronic

1949

Toronto harbour, wooden liner, one hundred and thirty-nine Location: Toronto Harbour, Ontario, Canada · Coordinates: 43.64°N 79.37°W · Casualties: 139 · Survivors: ~400 · Depth: destroyed at dockside · Cause: fire — Fire broke out in a linen locker at 02:30 on 17 September 1949 while docked in Toronto for an overnight stop. Wooden construction, a lone crewman on watch, and non-functioning fire hoses made containment impossible. Most passengers were asleep when the flames reached the cabin decks. · Fate: destroyed · Type: Great Lakes cruise liner · Canada Steamship Lines · Tonnage: 6,905 tons · Crew: 171 · Flag: Canada · Launched: 1913 Canada Steamship Lines Great Lakes cruise ship, calling Toronto in the middle of an Ontario-New York vacation circuit. Fire broke out in a linen locker at 02:30 on 17 September 1949 while docked overnight. Wooden panelling, an unattended fire watch, and non-functioning hoses let the flames consume her in under an hour. 139 dead, almost all of them American passengers asleep below. The disaster rewrote Canadian fire regulations and effectively ended wooden-superstructure passenger service on the Great Lakes. The Vessel The SS Noronic was a Canadian Great Lakes passenger steamer, built at the Port Arthur Shipbuilding Company yard at Port Arthur, Ontario (now part of Thunder Bay) between 1911 and 1913 and commissioned on 10 September 1913. She was 110 metres long, 6,905 gross tons, and powered by triple-expansion steam engines producing approximately 2,500 horsepower. Her accommodation comprised approximately 600 first-class passengers (no second-class or steerage on Great Lakes cruise ships) plus a crew of 200. She was owned and operated by the Canada Steamship Lines (CSL), one of the two dominant Great Lakes passenger shipping companies of the early twentieth century. Her operational deployment was the Great Lakes luxury cruise trade: week-long summer pleasure cruises between Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit, Windsor, Niagara Falls, and the Thousand Islands region. The Great Lakes cruise trade of the 1920s and 1930s had been a significant segment of North American tourism; Noronic and her sister-ships (Huronic, Hamonic) had been the principal vessels of CSL's luxury-cruise fleet. By September 1949, Noronic was 36 years old and substantially representative of the pre-war Great Lakes passenger fleet. Her accommodation had been substantially modernised over the preceding decades (electric lighting, steam heating, modern bathrooms), but her specific safety features (fire-fighting equipment, evacuation procedures, emergency lighting) reflected the standards of the 1913-era Great Lakes passenger trade The Disaster The fire spread with catastrophic rapidity through Noronic. The specific material combinations in the passenger-deck spaces - varnished wood panelling (applied in multiple coats over decades), accumulated dust, flammable textile furnishings, and oil-based paints - produced an intense and rapidly-spreading fire that was not containable by the ship's standard fire-fighting equipment. The specific failures of fire-control were systematic. The fire-alarm bell was not activated until approximately 02:38 on 17 September 1949, approximately eight minutes after detection; the ship's fire-fighting crew (reduced to two personnel overnight) was substantially inadequate for the rapidly-expanding fire; the fire-fighting hoses were found to be rotten and inoperative in multiple locations; and the specific spark-arrestor systems on the ship's air-conditioning had been partially disabled for maintenance. By approximately 02:45 on 17 September 1949, the fire had spread through the C-Deck and D-Deck passenger corridors and was progressing toward the upper decks. The passengers were predominantly asleep in their cabins; the specific public-address system's failure to announce the fire meant that passenger awareness of the fire was delayed. Many passengers only became aware of the fire when they were awakened by smoke and heat in their cabins; by this point, the specific evacuation routes had been substantially compromised by the fire. The specific evacuation patterns reflected the systematic fa