The Circus Fire (19 page)

In addition, Dr. Donald B. Wells, who coordinated the county's emergency plan, was the resident expert on burns. After the Cocoanut Grove fire, he'd taken a team of Hartford doctors up to Mass General to study their new emergency treatment procedures. When he returned he established a special burns committee and drew up guidelines for a similar disaster in Hartford. This would be the first time they used them.

Up on Westland, the truck carrying Elliott Smith weaved through traffic, blowing its horn.

"It hurts to lie on my back," Elliott told the soldier with him.

"Roll over on your stomach."

The pain was dull, just something that was there, steady. Then Elliott passed out.

At Municipal, the first car to pull up was a police cruiser. Right be-

hind it came the circus bus, the Red Cross cars, the army trucks, the private ambulances—filling the yard, parking on the grass. Like the rest of the country, the hospital was shorthanded because of the war; it had no paid orderlies, so janitors helped carry the injured in.

The corridors smelled of roasted flesh. The rescuers had brought everyone, so even before triage the doctors had to first separate the dead. "Some of the children were just plain black, their skin was seared so badly," said a driver for the Red Cross Motor Corps. "Some couldn't even be described as human beings."

The halls were lined with stretchers. One girl lay on her stomach, her back burned from her derriere up to her shoulders. Some of the injured were screaming, others mute, off in shock. Children jumped up and down with pain.

A doctor knelt beside Donald Gale and calmly talked with him. Donald gave him his name and address. The doctor said, "Lie still," but Donald was uncomfortable on his back. He went to roll over and noticed the pillow he was lying on was black with ash. He lay down on his back again.

He knew he was burned, but didn't know how bad exactly. His arms looked like they'd been sunburned. The skin was already peeling in sheets, the tissue beneath weeping fluid. From the end of his right index finger poked a bone. He wasn't scared so much as stunned, dumbfounded. He wasn't quite sure what was going on.

Two nurses came with scissors to cut away his clothes. He remembered his chameleon then; suddenly he was concerned about it. He looked down at his shirt. It was still there on its string leash, but stiff, motionless, its lifeless eye peering up at him.

Elliott Smith came to in a room with a few other survivors on cots. A nurse's aide was going around handing out tiny paper cups of orange juice. Elliott took one. It tasted so good he begged her for more, please, but the woman only had so much, and everyone was asking her for more. He passed out again. When he returned they were cutting his clothes off.

Jerry LeVasseur woke up inside an oxygen tent, separated from the world by a wall of canvas and plastic panels. Someone asked him his name and he gave it. Another person faraway said, "He may not make it."

When Stanley Kurneta carried Raymond Erickson inside, someone

told him to go to the fourth floor. He took the elevator with Raymond in his arms. Another person up there told him to lay his nephew on a mattress by the side of the hall. Standing there in a straw hat was a tall, stocky priest. He had a ruddy face.

"This is Raymond Erickson," Stanley told him. "Give him the last rites."

"All right," the Father said. He removed his hat and began to read a prayer from a book.

Stanley left. He needed to find his sister Mary and the rest of the family. Dazed, he couldn't find the elevator, so he walked down the stairs and out through the crowd and back along Vine Street toward the circus.

Downstairs, Mae Smith settled her girls in the hallway. She located a pay phone, hoping to let her husband in Middletown know what had happened, but her fingers were so swollen she couldn't dial the number.

Bill Curlee was here, though there was nothing they could do for him, and Mildred and Edward Cook. She could barely remember the ride. Now they came and took Edward from her, spirited him away to be treated.

First they gave the victims morphine to ease their pain, then administered plasma to replace lost blood volume, rehydrating patients so they wouldn't go into shock. (For years afterward, this was standard practice; now plasma is discouraged as it leaks into the lungs.) Because most had badly burned limbs, nurses had to search for veins, especially on small children, occasionally cutting them down to get the big needles in. Nurses snipped their clothes off and covered the injured with sterile sheets. Following Mass General's procedures after the Cocoanut Grove, they didn't de-bride the burned areas but left the blebs alone. Dressing teams wrapped patients with Vaseline-impregnated gauze and covered this with light plaster casts for even pressure. Tetanus shots and sulfa drugs would fight any infections.

Not all the people coming in were burned. Some had broken ankles and wrists or bad lacerations, others just rope burns or bruises from being stepped on. A twenty-two-year-old woman had a bad combination of both: two broken ankles and burns over most of her body. She'd taken her niece as a birthday present and tried to protect her when the flames rolled over them. The niece was here too, also in grave shape. And unknown to Elliott or Joan Smith, their mother had come in, her scalp and shoulders seared.

A young doctor stood at the front desk, shunting the less severely injured to the outpatient clinic, and still there were too many. The operating rooms were full, the dying backed up into the halls. He called the Red Cross for more doctors and nurse's aides. They promised to have the radio stations broadcast his request, but it would take time to mobilize people. Everyone seemed to be on vacation.

All the while, relatives of the dead and missing mobbed the lobby, trying to find their loved ones, demanding answers, crying and wailing, standing around and getting in the way. The place was bedlam. Outside, the injured and bereaved sat in the grass. A man who drove up with his wife took one look at the jammed entrance and turned around.

Hartford Hospital, with more room and adequate staff, fared better, but the scene was essentially the same—people brought in with skin hanging off their charred arms, the peeled patches a raw red. Broken limbs, victims passed out on cots, moaning. A nurse there said, "Those that weren't as bad could talk to you, and you tried to tell them it would be okay." Anxious parents moved from patient to patient, searching.

As the ambulances dropped off the injured, doctors and nurses set them out on stretchers in the hallways and did triage in the receiving rooms, then shipped the stable patients up to the wards. One interne devised a quicker method of delivering plasma to children by skipping the extremities and using the more protected femoral vein in the groin, eliminating the need for any cut downs. They followed the Cocoanut Grove procedures of no debridement and Vaselined gauze. Instead of the binding plaster casts used at Municipal, they substituted rolled newspaper splints and sterile-sheet wadding wrapped with Ace bandages. In addition to sulfa drugs, Hartford Hospital had access to penicillin and used it liberally. (As with the use of plasma to combat shock, penicillin is now discouraged in burn cases since it travels in the bloodstream while infection gathers in the burned, dead tissues; modern hospitals rely on antibiotic salves.)

Despite their emergency plan and its execution, the hospital was still a war zone, with all of war's horrors. A boy and his grandmother were here, both burned, the boy with a possible skull fracture, his grandmother burned on her face. A great number of adults were burned on the top of the head. The smell in South Building was like a roast left in the oven.

Though the number of dead was much smaller here, the heartbreak

was the same. One mother asked a nurse to check on her son, but when the nurse walked into his ward the child had just died. By hospital policy she had to report the death to a doctor; the doctor would inform the mother. The nurse was relieved. She didn't have the stomach to tell the woman.

Another young woman was unbumed but had miscarried. The strain of escaping aggravated an older man's heart condition. Fractured pelvises, broken backs. After having seen the people downstairs, they were glad to be alive.

St. Francis, the city's large Catholic hospital, didn't see its first patient until 3:25, well after the fire, but eventually treated nearly sixty people, using the more old-fashioned boric acid ointment on their burns. Among them was Mabel Epps, hysterical, worried for her unborn child and her two boys, her sister and her niece—all still missing. She wasn't burned, so the examining doctor assigned her to the maternity floor. The nurses there didn't know what to do. The woman would not stop crying.

Mt. Sinai, the small Jewish hospital downtown, hardly saw any casualties. A plastic surgeon there knew his wife had planned on taking their daughter to the matinee. When he called home there was no answer. The doctor's specialties were burns and skin grafting, so he was in charge of an ER team. With every stretcher he held his breath.

Unexpected guests

WTHT, an affiliate of the Mutual Broadcasting System, was carrying their "Game of the Day," the Red Sox and Tigers live from Fenway Park. The Sox were tarring Detroit behind Bobby Doerr's 4-for-4, Tex Hughson cruising to his thirteenth win, when the station's news staff heard about the fire from the
Times' city
desk. Their studios on the upper floors of the American Industrial Building downtown overlooked the North End; from their windows they could see the smoke. They were debating interrupting the network feed when the Mutual news broke in with a bulletin.

In New Britain, fans listening to the game noticed ambulances going by, screaming north for Hartford. When the announcer cut in, it suddenly made sense.

Governor Baldwin addressed the public at 3:00 P.M. Before he went on the air, "I was trying to keep calm myself. That's one thing that was going through my mind. I had been in hot spots before. I was in the navy in the First World War and had been in many hot spots and I know that to get excited, to do things hastily, was to confuse the efforts."

He came on and gave the basic facts, then asked everyone to please stay away from the grounds and let the rescue workers do their jobs. "I urge you all to be calm. Just remember this: Hysteria will only add to the confusion. It will only prevent us from doing everything that we can do to take care of the injured and identify those who are missing."

People who'd made it out of the tent easily were shocked to hear that others had been killed. Though they'd been involved, they hadn't realized the seriousness of the fire until they heard it on the radio.

Word spread throughout town. At the Palace and the Strand and the Allyn, announcements over loudspeakers asked all volunteers and nurse's

aides to report to the box office. The manager of the State Theater stopped
Snow White and the Seven Dwarf
in mid-reel, the screen suddenly blinding white. At Loew's Poli, ushers alerted the rows; at the Lenox, police went up and down the aisles.

Downtown, shoppers at G. Fox listened to the call-out for medical personnel every ten minutes. Report to the office and a truck will take you up to the grounds.

One father was working first shift at Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford when the announcement came over the intercom. He immediately punched out and drove to Shepherd Tobacco on Windsor Street to pick up his wife. Like so many parents, the two of them would search for hours.

Back on Barbour Street, as soldiers loaded bodies into the slat-sided army trucks, two small boys without a scratch on them stepped up to the white ticket wagon. Seeing as they didn't get to watch the whole show, they figured they ought to at least get a refund.

The sideshow top was untouched. The wind had pushed the flames east, away from the menagerie. Not a single animal was hurt. Camels and donkeys stood in the shade in neighbors' yards, tethered to tree trunks. Safe on the lot at the corner of Barbour and Charlotte, the elephants were still spooked by the fire, trumpeting with fright. Their handlers had to whack them to keep them quiet.

A cub reporter for the
Times
remarked on their eerie blasts as he made for the grounds. The sidewalks teemed with people, the firehoses solid as concrete underfoot.

Survivors straggled back to their cars only to discover they'd left their keys in their jackets and their jackets in the tent. Two women from Bolton returned to the yard where they'd parked to find their Pontiac gone. They'd left the keys in the car so the attendant could move it if necessary. Someone must have taken it to use as an ambulance, they concluded. They reported the incident to the police, trusting the car would be returned to them.

Families on Barbour Street opened their homes to the victims. One elderly woman served milk and ice water to children separated from their families. Stands that an hour ago sold lemonade at inflated prices now passed it out for free. A woman sewed a button back on for a little girl; her mother was so grateful she wrote a letter to the editor.