Distant but not dimmed
AInside, a baffling lack of urgency prevailed.
ny history of the tragedies visited upon Christchurch since its founding suffers, due to a devastating earthquake and an appalling mass shooting, from something of a recency bias. This week, however, offers an opportunity to look further back.
Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, on November 18, 1947, a fire tore through Ballantynes department store, claiming 41 lives. It was a tragedy as preventable as it was terrible.
About 3.35pm that day, staff member Percy Stringer spotted a wisp of smoke emerging from the basement. He went to check, but was driven back by fumes and smoke. He told a colleague to call the fire brigade.
What happened next is difficult to comprehend. The fire brigade only registered a second emergency call from the store, made at 3.46pm, and understood the fire was contained to the basement. When fire trucks arrived at the scene two minutes later, they were woefully underequipped for the scene confronting them. The fire was out of control and spreading through the building’s ventilation system.
Inside, a baffling lack of urgency prevailed. Despite smoke filling the lower levels, business continued as usual. Staff finishing their tea break were told to return to work. Customers were let into the store as late as 3.56pm.
The evacuation, when it finally came, was made ad hoc by individual staff members worried by the thickening smoke. As the fire surged, employees and shoppers raced for the exits. Staff on the upper floors, mostly young women working in the accounts and millinery departments, found the stairs blocked by smoke and flames. Ballantynes had no sprinkler or alarm system and inadequate fire escapes. They were trapped. Thirty-eight of the 41 fire victims were Ballantynes employees, mostly from these departments.
A commission of inquiry found that the fire brigade and Ballantynes management shared responsibility for the staggering loss of life. It recommended a host of reforms in building fire safety and the introduction of a national fire brigade. The former was implemented quickly; the latter took another 70 years.
Much of the horror of the tragedy was derived from its spectacle. Most disasters are remote – a ship sinks, a volcano erupts; or all-consuming – nobody stands witness as an earthquake strikes. But the Ballantynes fire happened in the middle of a functioning city, filled with thousands of people who could do little more than watch the devastation unfold.
‘‘For those in the neighbouring buildings who heard the screams of women and saw them moving frantically about in the inferno, those minutes will forever remain seared on their memories,’’ The Press wrote. ‘‘Spectators of fearful panic, with a tragically inevitable end, they were helpless.’’
Five days after the fire, a civic funeral was held for the dead. A photo of dozens of coffins arrayed for burial in a common grave at Ruru Cemetery is as confronting an image as those of the fire itself. ‘‘For some of the mourners,’’ The Press observed, ‘‘The strain of the last few days proved too great and these were assisted away.’’
The memory of a tragedy may dissipate with time, but its magnitude does not. In another 75 years, the Christchurch earthquakes and mosque shootings will seem similarly distant.
Even when most of us don’t remember, we should never not memorialise.