Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Research Paper

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Keira O’Neill Ms. Slevin Rahner Collegio 22 January 2024 A Spark for Reform “The floods of water from the firemen’s hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood.I remember their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded.more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer” (Shepherd). This statement by Shepherd Williams is just one of the many accounts of the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which rocked the nation in 1900 by revealing just how unsafe working conditions were in the factories and resulting in the creation of new workplace laws to keep workers safe. The workers of the factory had gone on strike only a few years prior, and anti-unionist owners Max Blanck …show more content…
In October 1911, the New York City Board of Alderman accepted the committee’s recommendations and created the Bureau of Fire Prevention, which distributed responsibilities for workplace inspections and enforcement, and made changes to the Municipal Building Code to require fireproof stairwells and materials, fire alarms, extinguishes, and hoses (Legislative Reform). The Bureau’s responsibility in conducting workplace inspections was vital in identifying and erasing the fire hazards that many factories contained from years without any regulations. The modifications it made also addressed many of the specific deficiencies that played a role in the severity of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire to ensure that a similar incident would never happen again. Not only did the Triangle Fire open up the opportunity to reform fire safety in the workplace, it also allowed for other workplace issues that had previously been ignored on a statewide level to be addressed. Soon after the fire, the Factory Investigative Commission was established in June 1911 by Francis