THE WATERBURY CONFLAGRATION.

THE WATERBURY CONFLAGRATION.

由于在很大程度上的不足protection against fire in the way of equipment, as well as. to the large number of wooden buildings within its fire limits, and, fortuitously, to a furious wind storm on Sunday and Monday, Waterbury, Conn., has at least four acres of buildings laid waste by fire in the business centre. The first notice of the fire was given by an almost simultaneous and mysterious outbreak of flames at about 6 :30 p. m. on all the lower floors of the big drygoods store of Reid & Hughes, where fifteen minutes before those who had been in the building had not perceived even the smell of smoke. The inflammable contents, of course, fed the fire, which was quite beyond control before the alarm was given, and had already engaged the tall building westward and rearward occupied as a Salvation Army barracks and a Turkish bath. The blaze spread rapidly, and had there been in its path any solid fireproof or slowburning structures here, the course of the flames would probably have been stopped on this side. Instead of that, however, there was a nest of some thirty frame tenements, each one a firetrap, which burned like tinder.

The firemen, though well nigh paralysed by the evident impossibility of fighting the fire with the limited resources on hand (referred to and enumerated in the editorial columns), and handicapped by the raging wind, the bitter cold, and the number of wooden buildings, which should never have found place in the chief business centre of such an important city, kept on in desperation, and wherever it was possible seized every coign of vantage from which to operate. But. as they could not be everywhere at once, and the flames seemed endued with ubiquitous powers, the latter naturally had the best of it, and finding nothing to oppose them in this place or that (for the firemen, with their too limited amount of apparatus could fight only where it seemed to be most important to keep the fire down), as often as not had it all their own way, especially among the numerous frame buildings. Outside help was telegraphed for, and by means of the aid thus afforded the conflagration was got under control bv midnight, only to burst forth again at about 4 o’clock a. m. near the city hall and the police station. This time it was the Scovill house that was burned.