One morning last week at New Rochelle, N.Y., the students of the college of that name were entering chapel for seven o'clock mass when flames (caused by a short circuit) burst from the ceiling; the students fled unhurt.
The same morning at Strasbourg, France, the gasoline tank of a motor bus exploded in a car barn, covered ten workmen with flaming gasoline; three soon died; others were expected to.
The same morning at Cornish, N. H., there was a kerosene explosion in a one-room cabin: two young mothers, three infants and the cabin were incinerated; an adolescent youth escaped, gravely burned.
That fatal morning was not yet over. At 11:35 in the basement of the Cleveland Clinic, at 93rd Street and Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, a stock of X-ray films exploded. At that hour there were 234 people in the building. Within 15 minutes about 100 of them were dead, with many more dying.
The first explosion was followed by a second, greater one. Glass was blown from the windows. The force of the explosion blew out a skylight and the descending fragments fell through a shaft upon the people seated in the waiting room three floors below. Plaster showered from walls and ceilings. A heavy yellow gas poured through the building. Doctors, nurses and patients sniffed it and fled. Some seated in chairs took a long breath and died without moving. Some reached the windows, prepared to jump, but billows of gas enveloped them and they fell back dead. Others succeeded in leaping from the first and second story windows. Some limped away. Some lay writhing in agony and died upon the lawn, for the gas followed them even into the open. Passersby upon the street collapsed.
Meanwhile nurses and others, many partly clothed, fled from the two main exits of the building, screaming and clutching their throats. Firemen and policemen rushed to the scene. For 15 minutes they could not penetrate the fumes without gas masks.
Fire ladders were extended to the roof. The firemen looked down through the broken skylight on a stairway filled with a mass of struggling bodies, arms and legs twisted and intertangled. Screams and shrieks of agony arose. The rescuers broke their way in from the roof. More than 16 bodies blocked the stairway. Only one, that of a doctor, seemed alive. He was removed first but died in a hospital.
Pulmotors were carried into the building from the roof and applied to the victims as headway was made into the smoke-filled rooms. A few of those revived were able to walk to ladders and descend. The great majority were carried out. The lawns adjoining were littered with the bodies of the dead and dying, all yellow from the gas. Rescue squads worked over them with pulmotors. Only those who received immediate oxygen treatment survived. One man who had escaped said, "The gas didn't bother me. Help the others who are dying." Five minutes later he collapsed and died on the way to a hospital. An X-ray salesman who had been in the building, although warned to go to a hospital, insisted on helping the rescuers. He soon gave up, presented himself, laughing, at a hospital for treatment, was dead within ten minutes.