Our Lady of the Angels

The fire began in a cardboard drum at the foot of a stairwell in the older wing, about twenty minutes before the end of the school day.

The building met the code because the code exempted buildings put up before 1949. There was no sprinkler system, no fire doors on the stairwells, no alarm connected to the fire department, and one fire escape.

Smoke went up the open stairwell and along the corridor above, cutting off the second floor. The children in those rooms went to the windows - twenty-five feet above the ground - and the crowd below could do nothing but catch them.

Ninety-two children and three Sisters of Charity died. Several of the nuns kept their classes in their seats praying, as they had been taught to do, and died with them. The teachers who told their children to jump lost fewer.

Within a year some sixteen thousand American schools had been brought up to standard. A cardinal said the Church would build no more schools like it.