What Happened
- No one knows exactly what started the fire that afternoon. Someone may have accidentally flicked a match into one of the bins beneath the tables after lighting a cigarette. These bins were filled with scraps of cloth that caught fire very easily.
- Unfortunately, the exit doors appeared to be locked. Frightened women and girls pushed and pulled at the doors, but they would not open.
- With the main stairway on fire and the other doors locked, the trapped workers had no escape routes. They burned to death on the factory floor, stampeded toward the elevator shaft or jumped to their deaths from the windows. Firemen, whose ladders were too short to reach the ninth floor, watched helplessly with thousands of onlookers as the workers died.
- Within that short half hour, 146 people either burned to death or were killed by falling from the windows of the asch building