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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures." -- Daniel Webster
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Friday, February 21, 2003 :::
The Rhode Island Fire is already being compared to Monday morning's events here in Chicago, and there are obvious similarities, but the essence of the Chicago incident — and a major component of the historical fires mentioned in this blog earlier this week — is that in each of those situations, if you ran them a couple thousand times with three or four individuals at a time, everyone would almost always have probably made it out alive. It sounds like the crowd contributed something to this incident in Rhode Island, but it also sounds as though the fire itself was much worse than in the Iriquois Theatre or the Cocoanut Club. (A somewhat more recent really big bad fire that also lacks the crowd component was — and this is some lazy linking here — the fire at Our Lady of the Angels Elementary School back in 1958 on Chicago's west side. That fire managed to sneak up on classes until the victims were trapped in their rooms, while the fire last night made up in speed what it lacked in surreptitiousness.)
::: posted by dWj at 10:01 AM
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