FEW SUCCEED IN ESCAPING FROM INFERNO

Investigation Opens Into Worst U.S. Hotel Fire

ATLANTA, Ga., Dec 7, (U.P.) – A mass of flames shot through the 15-story Winecoff Hotel, today an inferno which killed 120 persons, and tonight an exhaustive investigation was begun to learn the cause of the holocaust, worst hotel fire in the nation’s history.

In three hours of flaming hell, while fire raged unchecked, the hotel’s 280 guests tried to escape. A few succeeded, some of them with miraculous tales of their experiences. But most of the men, women and children who jammed the 194 rooms for the weekend were either killed or injured.

Leap From Windows
Many of the injured were horribly burned or had multiple fractures caused by leaping from windows.

As flames shot skyward through the brick structure, guests awoke in a smoky fog. From windows and window ledges, aroused from their slumber and crazed by terror, they called for help, pleading to be rescued. But many of them fell or leaped to death, their nightclothes trailing ribbons of flames.

While the dead were still being counted, all employes [sic] of the hotel were called for exhaustive questioning by fire officials seeking to determine the cause.

Met Safety Standards
City Fire Marshal Harry Phillips said the Winecoff had been inspected during the past week and had met fire department regulations. Atlanta hotels are inspected once a month.

The National Hotel Guide listed the Winecoff as fireproof but Phillips said he did not consider any building in that category, only fire resistant. As far as firemen could find, there were no fire escapes.

An unidentified fireman believed the fire was caused by the explosion of some type of gas in the interior of the building. Officially, there was no explanation.

All Ambulances Called
Every ambulance within a 20-mile radius of the city was called to move the dead and injured soon after the fire started before dawn.

Taxicabs were pressed into service as hearses, and this time the meter hands were not pushed down.

Forty-nine youngsters, here for the Georgia state youth conference, were registered at the hotel. Their closing meeting had been planned for this morning and most of them retired early. Then the nightmare fire struck about 3:30 a.m.

The final meeting of the assembly was held on schedule, but it was turned into a memorial service for the one youth known to be dead and the 25 still listed as missing. Five others were in hospital beds, their bodies scarred by burns and broken by falls from the flaming building.

Call for Donors
Hospitals received emergency supplies of plasma to treat the injured, but even as nurses carried it into operating rooms, doctors sent out a call for whole blood – pints and quarts of it. Lines of donors began forming at the city’s principal hospitals in response to radio appeals for blood.

The fire started between 3 and 4 a.m. at about the fourth floor of the Winecoff, and in a moment orange flames were billowing up the elevator shafts and stairways. Flames shot out from dozens of windows.

The fire was discovered by a negro elevator girl, Rosita, who ran to Night Manager Comer L. Rowan with word that she smelled smoke.

Rowan sent her away for the bellhops while he jumped for the telephone switchboard and began phoning the rooms.

Out Of Control
In the next few minutes, the first screams of the trapped sleepers began to echo through the halls and bodies began hurtling from the upper floors.

Firemen, ordered to answer all downtown calls with every piece of equipment, came with life nets, long ladders, and high pressure pumpers. They arrived within a minute or two of the alarm, but already the flames were raging out of control.

Firemen heroically plunged through what seemed to be solid walls of flames to effect miraculous rescues.

Firemen implored some of the trapped guests to stay where they were until help arrived, but many were too horrified by the flames and leaped to their deaths in the streets below.

Plunge to Death
Some survived by fashioning ropes from bed sheets and blankets and hanging form windows, but others who tried this plunged to death because the cloth would not hold their weight.

As the fire was extinguished after five hours of pouring tons of water into the furnace, the pitiful procession of the dead and injured still moved away from the scene to morgues and hospitals.

While the hotel was supposedly fireproof, the seventh through tenth floors were not just damaged but totally destroyed. The only thing that remained in these rooms were the metal decorations on some of the beds.

Windows, doors, toilet seats, dressers, tables – everything in them – were burned to a crisp.

There were many children in the hotel last night. A mother saved her baby by holding it out of a window, protecting it from the heat by her own body. Both were rescued.
But an unidentified truck driver told how he saw another mother, maddened by hysterics, holding two children from an upper floor window.

For a few minutes she clung to them, but then her nerves gave away. She released her hold and the children plummeted end over end to the street. Then she stepped to the window ledge and leaped after them, screaming wildly.

The children fell at the feet of the truck driver who said he saw the little boy, around five, “jerking horribly” in the street. Although sickened by the sight, he helped put the injured boy in one of the ambulance as another loaded the other child and their mother for a last trip to the morgue.

There were many heroes. Others went to death smiling.
Elderly Mrs. Banks Whiteman was trapped on the fifteenth floor. She ran into the hallway and found Mrs. E. F. Geels, Sr., wife of the hotel’s owner, being swamped by a surging mob.

Mrs. Whiteman grabbed the other woman and pulled her back into her room. There they sat until rescued by firemen.

Former Medical Corps Captain Richard Turk, of Atlanta, rescued several persons by making a rope of blankets and forcing them to climb down from the tenth to the ninth floor where firemen took them to safety on ladders.

A brother, T. G. Turk, of Tulsa, Okla., occupied a room with his wife and two-year-old daughter, Diana. He soaked blankets and tied them into a rope, hanging her out a window until they were all rescued. A few minutes later she was romping and playing in the lobby of another hotel, still clad in her nightie and seemingly unaware of the peril that had been so close.

Nevada State Journal, Reno, NV 8 Dec 1946

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Among the dead was W. F. WINECOFF, 70, one of the hotel’s builders, who died in his upper-floor apartment. His wife is missing.

Nelson Thatch, chief room clerk who lived on the sixth floor, pleaded futilely with a woman one floor below but she leapt to her death in an alley. Another woman was forcibly restrained by Bell Capt. William Mobley and an unidentified army major.
Mr. and Mrs. T. G. Turk of Tulsa, Okla., held their two-year-old daughter, Nancy Dianne, one-side [sic] their window until firemen reached them. They were rescued. Turk’s two brothers, John M. and Richard, swung form the tenth floor to the ninth an bed sheets, and were rescued by firemen.

Fifty Hi-Y girlls [sic] from all over Georgia were quartered in the hotel. Some escaped, and the fate of others unknown. Emergency mortuaries were set up throughout Atlanta after the municipal morgue reported it was at capacity.

F. A. Herring, hotel auditor, said he awoke in his third-floor room about 3:30. “I never saw anything like it,” he said. Bodies were hurtling down past my window.”

Police Chief M. A. Hornsby said “at least 25 or 30 persons were killed by leaping from windows. One woman dropped on a ladder where Fireman Jack Burnham was attempting to reach another woman. Burnham was critically hurt, the woman was killed.

Reno Evening Gazette, Reno, NV 7 Dec 1946
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Transcribed by Jenni Lanham. Thank you, Jenni!