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At the hospitals, janitors and washerwomen were pressed into service to help administer oxygen. One young interne started to give oxygen to a woman and discovered she was his wife. She died while he worked over her. Through the next day, persons who had escaped and many rescuers who had gone home, thinking themselves safe suddenly collapsed. They were taken to hospitals. Many of them died. Ben Jones, professional football player, only slightly gassed in the Clinic, drove home, 150 miles to Grove City, Pa., became ill 24 hours later and died.
At the morgue bodies strewed the floor because all the slabs were occupied. A sign painter lettered the names of the victims on a large billboard as they were identified. There were 125 all told, including 17 from the staff of the Clinic. It was the worst catastrophe in Cleveland since 172 schoolchildren were burned to death in 1908.
The shock of the disaster extended not only throughout the U. S. but to Europe. The Lord Mayor of London telephoned to Mayor John Daniel Marshall of Cleveland to express sympathy. The editors of the London Sketch and Daily News telephoned to Managing Editor Thomas Aaron Robertson of the Cleveland News to get the details of the tragedy for their papers.
What the deadly fumes were composed of was only guessed. Apparently it was a mixture. The coroner had the blood of several victims examined and found bromine and hydrocyanic acid (both deadly). Others hazarded that there were quantities of carbon monoxide in the gas. The fact that many, not apparently suffering at first, later succumbed, led to the supposition that nitrogen dioxide (brown gas like bromine) was one of the poisons.
At first the origin of the explosions was believed to have been the X-ray room where twelve bodies were found. Later it was placed in the film storage room in the basement. On the morning of the disaster one Buffery Bogg, steamfitter, had been called to repair a leaking steam pipe. He found the leak in the film room and removed a section of the covering, but the pipe was too hot to work on. So he went out and asked to have the steam turned off. When he returned the room was filled with steam. Something on the ceiling was on fire. He turned a fire extinguisher on it, was overcome by smoke, then literally blown out of the basement by an explosion.
There was a steel fire door on the film room fitted with a thermostat to close it if the temperature became too high. But sometime before, a blundering plumber had placed a water pipe in such a way that although it did not prevent the closing of the door by hand, it interfered with the aim of the automatic closing device. The door failed to close when the film began to burn and the gases (both poisonous and explosive) issuing forth, were driven through the building by a ventilating fan a few feet away.
In recent years a nonexplosive cellulose nitrate type acetate X-ray film has been developed, but the films in the clinic were evidently of the more common and highly inflammable cellulose nitrate type. Under writers recommend that films be stored in metal vaults on the roof rather than in the basement of buildings.