I am interested in finding out more information about the fire. My grandmother lived in Effingham and witnessed the fire.
My grandfather went to help at the hospital during the fire.

On April 5, 1949, St. Anthony's hospital caught fire and burned to the ground, killing 70 people. As a result, fire codes nationwide were improved. Due to extensive media coverage, including a LIFE magazine cover story, donations for rebuilding the hospital came from all 48 states and several foreign countries.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effingham,_Illinois

Just before midnight on April 4, 1949, a fire erupted at St. Anthony's Hospital being the second worst disaster in the United States in such an occupancy of its time claiming the lives of 75 persons, 14 of them infants. The [Effingham] fire department consisted of twenty-six men, including the Chief, with all but one, who was in Chicago at the time, engaged in fighting the fire. The equipment at the time included two 500 gpm pumpers, and a 750 gpm pumper. There was no ladder truck or other apparatus. The department had a limited amount of good hose and fittings but had no life net and was deficient in heavy duty appliances. . . . The nearest aerial ladder at the time belonged to a department twenty-seven miles away. Mutual-aid was received from 11 area departments, the furthest being sixty-six miles away. Witnesses said that the fire spread like a ball of fire and a majority spoke of its rapid spread. Within three hours, floors, roofs, and part of the walls had fallen, leaving little but a rubble-filled skeleton, in which were buried the bodies of many victims. The hospital consisted of a basement and three floors.

In the aftermath of the St. Anthony's Hospital fire, many states and municipal governments set about overhauling their regulatory measures designed to prevent duplication of such disasters. Governor Adlai Stevenson directed the Illinois State Fire Marshal to reexamine at once the fire protection of all state and private hospitals.

The City of Effingham, Illinois Fire Department History
http://www.effinghamil.com/content/1/11/2

My mother was a patient in the hospital the night of this disaster. She was awakened about midnight by a woman's scream and went to the door of her room to investigate. As she peered into the corridor, a wall of flame exploded around the corner at the far end of the hallway and rushed toward her. She barely managed to slam her door before the fire reached the doorway.

Without even realizing she'd done so, Mom grabbed her purse from the bedside table as she hurried to the window, which she opened to call for help. Though she was only on the "first" floor, the old building's partial basement and high ceilings meant that her windowsill was about 15 feet above the pavement below. Smoke very quickly filled the room, causing her to sit on the windowsill and lean out so that she could breathe.

After the fire burned through her closed door, she soon was hanging from the windowsill by her fingers (with the varnish melting beneath them and her purse still dangling from the crook of her arm) as a man who lived near the hospital called to her that he was on his way to help her down safely. He had carried a kitchen chair from his home and was methodically moving from window to window where patients were calling for help, standing on the chair and reaching up to ease people down the side of the building one at a time so that they would not fall onto the hard surface below. As he was helping Mom, the flames billowed out through her window and they both fell part of the way to the ground. (I read in one news account that at least one man who was helping people from those windows suffered burns on his face and hands in the process.) Upon her escape, Mom realized that her rescuer was Benny Harker, a childhood friend from rural Coles County, Illinois.

Neighbors from all around the hospital were rushing to the building with their own step ladders to try to help people out the lower windows and many, awakened by the midnight cries for help, dragged the mattresses from their own beds in hopes of cushioning the fall of people poised to leap from the upper floors.

An elderly nun brought her own bathrobe and slippers to Mom (who was wearing a short split-at-the-back hospital gown) and took her to the neighboring sisters' residence, where she tucked her into her own bed. The nun returned almost immediately to say that because the fire was in danger of spreading to the sisters' building, they needed to move farther away. They then proceeded to a nearby garage where bedding had been spread on the floor so that evacuees could be placed there while awaiting first aid. As they triaged patients, the medical attendants were able to use a lipstick from Mom's ever-present purse to mark a red X on the forehead of each person needing urgent attention. I believe this same garage to which the patients were evacuated was later used as a makeshift morgue when the first bodies were recovered from the ruins.

Before dawn the morning of the fire, someone telephoned our farmhouse in Cumberland County to say, "Your patient is safe, but St. Anthony Hospital has burned to the ground." Mother herself phoned soon afterward to tell Dad, "Come and get me!"

Due to the chaos immediately after the fire, my mother's younger brother was mistakenly telephoned and told that his sister had died of injuries suffered in the fire. He was already grieving before he learned of the mistake, and said that he did not believe Mom was safe until he had heard her own voice over the telephone.

From various articles (which echo theories Mom heard and read during the ensuing investigations of the fire) I have the impression that the cause was eventually suspected of being spontaneous combustion in cleaning rags piled in the basement. What may have happened was that they smoldered for hours (undiscovered because this was late at night) causing explosive gasses to fill the network of laundry chutes which honeycombed the walls and to accumulate along the high ceilings of the upper corridors before they became detectable by the few people who were awake and moving about the building at that hour. When such smoldering eventually erupted into flame, it would have caused the sort of explosion and fast-moving fire which was described by witnesses.