Forgotten Disasters

A. Kam Napier

Still, I had never heard of the General Slocum until
I stumbled across the account in a New York Times article about last year’s Staten
Island Ferry accident (remember that one? Where the ferry rammed into a pier,
at speed, killing 11 people?). The Times dredged up the General Slocum story for
historical context, as both that disaster and the 2003 ferry accident led to the
rarely used criminal charge of “seaman’s manslaughter.” But that snippet of maritime
law history didn’t grab me as much as the idea that 1,000 people could die in
a single horrific fire, and I’d never heard of it. The General Slocum doesn’t
seem to have entered our cultural vocabulary at all. No one ever says, “Be careful
with that match-remember the General Slocum!”

The tales of some disasters
flourish, while others die of neglect. You’ve no doubt heard of the Great Chicago
Fire. From the cow barn behind Patrick O’Leary’s cottage, the fire spread and
burned for more than a day, killing 300 and leaving 90,000 Chicagoans homeless.

But have you ever heard of the Great Peshtigo Fire? No? Me neither, until
I started looking for these forgotten disasters. The Great Peshtigo Fire was the
worst forest fire in recorded North American history, burning up thousands of
acres of Wisconsin and Michigan and killing as many as 2,400 people. It started
on the same night as the Great Chicago Fire, Sunday, October 8, 1871. Two fires
on the same date and we forget the bigger, deadlier one? Bizarre.

Hawai’i
has a forgotten modern disaster, too. Everyone has heard of the Sunday, Dec. 7,
1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. But have you ever heard of the West Loch Disaster?
On Sunday, May 21, 1944 (what is it with Sunday and devastation?), 29 ships were
massed in Pearl Harbor’s West Loch, loading up for an invasion of Saipan. The
ships were full of fuel and ammunition. Unfortunately, one of them exploded, just
why no one is exactly sure. In minutes, explosions and fires tore through the
fleet. By the time the blazes were put out, 163 men had died, nearly 400 others
were wounded, six of the landing ships had sunk and some 20 shoreside buildings
were damaged.

Ships burn during the West Loch disaster of 1944. Photo: Courtesy USS Arizona Memorial

So why do we remember,
say, the 1,500 lost when the Titanic sank in 1912, but not the hecatomb of the
General Slocum? Perhaps it’s because no one ever boasted that the General Slocum
was “unburnable.” I can’t imagine that anyone still grieves for the Titanic’s
casualties, but we do still love the story of pride going before a fall. The investigation
into the General Slocum’s ghastly fire led to safety reforms for steamships, but,
a century later, those lessons seem irrelevent to jet travelers worried about
terrorism.

It’s the story and not the disaster that seems to matter. The
Chicago Fire probably just got better press than the Peshtigo fire-the big city
being full of photographers, writers, journalists, and so on, who actually found
themselves living in the middle of a great story. Fewer people died in the Chicago
fire, but 90,000 people made homeless in a single night is a big tale, as was
the Phoenix-like reconstruction of the city in a few short years. Plus, the Chicago
fire has the absurd element of having been started by a cow. It was a great story,
affecting tens of thousands willing to tell it.

As for the West Loch disaster,
even kama’äina could be excused for having never heard about it. The Navy kept
it quiet, and, once the war ended and the story could be told, hardly anyone wanted
to hear it. Less than 200 dead? Such a comparatively small horror for its day.
No one vists the rusting hulk of LST-480, still jutting out of Pearl Harbor today.
It was just an accident victim, after all, with no larger lesson to impart.

We
can’t go through life remembering every bad thing that ever happened. A hundred
years out, there’s no use lighting a candle for the General Slocum’s dead. Maybe
that is the General Slocum’s lesson for us.