PS General Slocum

1904

East River, church excursion, rotten vests Location: East River, off North Brother Island, New York City · Coordinates: 40.80°N 73.90°W · Casualties: 1,021 · Survivors: ~321 · Depth: destroyed · Cause: fire — Fire broke out in a forward storage locker at approximately 10:00 on 15 June 1904, likely from a discarded match into a barrel of straw or packing oil. The captain chose to run for shore rather than beach the ship, feeding the flames with wind. Life preservers were rotten, the crew had never drilled, the fire hoses had perished in storage. · Fate: destroyed · Type: sidewheel paddle steamer · Tonnage: 1,284 tons · Crew: 40 · Flag: United States · Launched: 1891 Sidewheel paddle steamer chartered by a German-Lutheran Sunday school on the Lower East Side for their annual summer outing. Fire broke out in a forward locker at 10:00 on 15 June 1904; the captain ran for shore instead of beaching, feeding the flames. Life preservers rotten, fire hoses perished, crew never drilled. 1,021 dead, overwhelmingly women and children: the worst disaster New York City would know until September 2001. The Vessel The PS General Slocum was an American side-wheel paddle steamer, built at the Devine Burtis shipyard at Brooklyn, New York, in 1891 for the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company. She was 80 metres long, 1,284 gross tons, and powered by a vertical-beam steam engine driving twin side paddle wheels. Her original employment was the New York City excursion trade: day-long charter cruises for church groups, fraternal societies, and Sunday school outings on the Hudson River, the East River, and the New Jersey coastal waters. The ship had been named after Union Army General Henry Warner Slocum (1827-1894), a Civil War corps commander and subsequent New York Congressman. Her accommodation comprised three passenger decks with a combined capacity of approximately 2,500 passengers, plus a crew of 25-30. She was, at her commissioning in 1891, among the larger excursion steamers of the New York region and had been certified by the US Steamboat Inspection Service for Hudson River and New York harbour operations. By June 1904 she was 13 years into commercial service. Her life-saving equipment had been renewed at various intervals: her 12 lifeboats, 10 inflatable life-rafts, and approximately 2,500 cork-filled life preservers had been installed at various dates between 1891 and 1904 under specific US Steamboat Inspection Service regulations. The life-saving equipment, and specifically the condition of the life preservers, would prove catastrophically inadequate on 15 June 1904. Her master on her fi The Disaster The fire spread with catastrophic speed through General Slocum. The specific material combinations in the forward cabin - straw, paint, oakum, paraffin - combined to produce an intense and rapidly-spreading fire that was not containable by the ship's standard fire-fighting equipment. The fire-hoses on the forward deck, when the crew attempted to activate them, were found to be rotten and inoperative; the pumps, when activated, delivered water at pressure insufficient to reach the fire location; and the life preservers, distributed frantically to the panicking passengers, disintegrated on contact with the water. The life preservers were, it subsequently emerged, the single most damning failure of the disaster. The cork-filled life preservers aboard General Slocum had been purchased in 1891 at her commissioning and had never been replaced through the subsequent 13 years. The cork, which provided the life preservers' flotation, had substantially deteriorated over 13 years of storage; many of the preservers had been weighted with iron bars during the original 1891 inspection to bring them up to the statutory minimum weight of 6 pounds (the Steamboat Inspection Service weight specification was intended as a quality standard, but the weighting bars had been retained when the cork degraded). When passengers jumped into the water wearing the life preservers, the degraded cork provided no flotation, and the iron weights pulled the wearers underwater. Captain van Schaick's decision, ma