The Great Fire

The Great Fire. The Disaster that Changed Boston. , At 7:22 PM on November 9, 1872, a warehouse on nearby Summer Street caught fire. Soon all of downtown Boston was ablaze in a disaster of epic proportions. Damages totaled nearly 75 million dollars, equal to more than one billion dollars today. This neighborhood was one of the hardest hit. Local business owners lost almost everything., [Captions:] , The Losses , The 12-hour fire consumed about 65 acres, represented by the pink area on this map. More than 775 buildings were destroyed and 20 people killed. Nine of the dead were firefighters., Highly Flammable , Boston's buildings were tinderboxes. The exteriors may have been brick and granite, but roofs, elevator shafts, and stairways were wood. To make matters worse, many downtown warehouses contained flammable goods like fabric., Chaos in the Streets , In addition to looters, firefighters faced many challenges that night. They also confronted low water pressure, tricky gas lines, far too few fire hydrants, and plain bad luck. Many of the horses needed to transport firefighting equipment happened to be sick that night., A City in Ruins , "From all the city, all the surrounding towns, men and women come to see the desolation," according to an eyewitness account of the event and its aftermath. Cleanup began with a few days of the fire and continued for months afterward., An Unheeded Warning , Prior to the disaster, Boston Fire Chief John Damrell repeatedly cautioned city officials that the city was extremely vulnerable to fire. As early as 1866, he requested, and was denied, building code updates and a better equipped fire department.