Plague and Fire

by James C. Mohr

  But the ruling triumvirate of Emerson, Day, and Wood refused to abandon the basic principle of burning only confirmed bacterial sites, however broadly defined, even within Chinatown. Indeed, with the prospect of additional cases popping up all around the city, that principle seemed more important than ever. Carmichael, the United States Marine Hospital Service officer, commended the resolve of his three friends on the Honolulu Board of Health. "People who become frightened" under circumstances like these "only make matters worse," he told the Citizens' Sanitary Commission. As a matter of fact, he quipped half-seriously, "it would be a really good thing" if all those people who were trying to stampede the Board into more extreme actions "could be accommodated with passports" and allowed to leave.31

  Countering the extreme anti-Chinatown sentiment throughout the city, the Board physicians took steps in defense of the district. They formally recognized the appointment of F. M. Brooks, a leading white attorney, as official representative of the United Chinese Society, some of whose members had feared that Consul Yang might sell them out in exchange for preferred treatment of his own business allies. President Wood even authorized Brooks to attend the Board's regular meetings and speak for his clients. On the afternoon of January 19, the Board sent another clear signal by staying a preliminary order to burn Chung Kun Ai's City Mill. Overzealous inspectors from the Citizens' Sanitary Commission had reported City Mill to be rat infested, but Emerson, Day, and Wood accepted the arguments of Henry Holmes, Chung's white lawyer, who pointed out that a building still under construction could not yet be infested with rat nests, that no one had died at City Mill, and that, as a practical matter, the Board needed the mill to continue processing lumber to build facilities for the people displaced by other condemnations. 32

  Notwithstanding their firm responses, the deteriorating situation was beginning to strain the working relationship of the Board's three physicians, and for the first time since they assumed power together, the triumvirate disagreed over a major policy. The disagreement involved the promise they had earlier given Consul Yang that all Chinese commercial goods would be fumigated and stored if the merchants provided storage space. This process had become so tedious, expensive, and time consuming that Wood had come to the conclusion that it should be abandoned, particularly for perishable goods, which Wood considered the most likely to harbor bacteria and the most likely to lose their value in any event. Once Wood made up his mind, his friends knew that he would be hard to move. Even so, the politically savvy Emerson, a veteran of many dicey public health situations, and the affable Day, Wood's lifelong pal and medical partner, both demurred. For the time being at least, Emerson and Day blocked the president's desire to alter the Board's original promise to the Chinese businessmen.

  Speaking "in very strong and impassioned language," Wood vented his frustration to representatives from the Council of State. The primary goal of the Board's policies, he argued, was the relocation of vulnerable humans away from plague sites, which could then be destroyed. But now, he said, "We feel that the plague is gaining on us; and that we are not throttling it as we should. We have not been able to remove the population [from diseased sections of Chinatown] as expeditiously as we would like." In his mind, the two prime reasons for the lack of progress were "the wasting [of] time and energy ... handling ... large amounts of merchandise" and the fact that the Board "had no place to put the people." Though under intense public pressure as the Board's president and point man, and more than a little annoyed with his closest colleagues, the strong-willed Wood eventually calmed down. When he did, the three physicians regrouped to continue their campaign against pestis.33

  etermined to maintain their policies intact, Emerson, Day, and Wood continued to condemn specific plague sites on a daily basis. The fire department, in turn, continued to execute controlled burns. On Saturday morning, January 20, Chief Hunt and his men prepared to incinerate a tangle of shacks in what was identified on the quarantine maps as block 15. The doctors had walked that block themselves on Tuesday afternoon and had returned to their office to formally condemn the shacks, when they learned that Sarah Boardman had died.'

  Although the fire department had burned much larger buildings earlier in the week, Hunt took unusually strong precautions on Saturday morning because the condemned shacks were within a few hundred feet of Kaumakapili Church, the most visually prominent and revered landmark in the Chinatown district. The fire chief knew the story of how the building's patron, King Kalakaua, had personally rescued "the people's church" during the kitchen fire conflagration of 1886 by rushing to the scene and directing destruction of the buildings around it. The king's quickwitted actions on that occasion had created a fire break that saved the church, and since then the building had enjoyed near-mythic status. Hunt certainly did not want to be the one who lost it.'

  Hunt ordered every member of his department to be present for this Saturday morning burn, and he had all four of the department's pumping engines placed in standby positions near the church. The chief and his assistants carefully assessed both the terrain and the configuration of the structures to be burned, calculated the direction of the morning's soft breeze, and decided exactly where to begin the fire. As usual at these sanitary burns, a crowd of Chinatown residents gathered to watch. Commercial photographers, who obtained special passes, steadied their tripods. The day's controlled burn was ignited at about 9:00 A.M.;

  By all accounts, the fire began exactly as planned. Once well established and blazing vigorously, the flames started to move slowly away from the church, exactly as Hunt had anticipated, destroying the condemned shacks in an orderly manner as they advanced deliberately toward the hills above Chinatown. Suddenly, however, after about an hour, the morning's light breezes gave way to strong gusts coming powerfully down off the pali slopes that rose steeply behind the city. Such an abrupt shift of wind conditions, uncharacteristic for that time of day and that season, caught everyone by surprise. In a matter of minutes, the bellows-like downdrafts turned the planned fire back upon itself and transformed what had been an orderly burn into something resembling an open blast furnace, complete with a dangerous fountain of burning embers rising sixty feet into the air.

  Given the speed with which all this happened and the force of the unexpected gusts, Hunt's men had no hope of damping the original fire. Instead, they concentrated their efforts on preventing its spread backward, especially in the direction of Kaumakapili. Engine No. i, the new pumper, had already been stationed at a key post next to the church. The firefighters operating that engine maintained a steady soaking stream on the building, and for a brief period Hunt's men on the ground held the fire back. Overhead, however, one of the windblown embers lodged near the top of Kaumakapili's eastern spire and ignited the steeple. Hunt ordered his men to aim for the top of the steeple and to risk bursting their hoses if necessary, but none of the fire department's engines was capable of generating enough pressure to propel water up to the fire in the steeple. One heroic firefighter entered the church, climbed to the roof rafters, made his way along the beams, and chopped a hole to employ a chemical extinguisher on the steeple fire. But flames rushed through the hole against him. He barely managed to escape alive.

  From the steeple, the fire worked back along the roofline and down into the main part of the building, where it ignited large piles of clothing brought to the church from previously condemned plague sites for fumigation and storage. Realizing that they could not save Kaumakapili, the firefighters redeployed downwind, toward the center of Chinatown, in an effort to save the next series of buildings across the street. As they did so, flames broke through the roof and walls of the church and ignited the surrounding shops and rooming houses. Horrified onlookers did their best to help the firemen shift positions by dragging hoses and hauling engines. Hawaiians in the crowd wept openly as their principal church became fully engulfed in flames. "On all sides could be heard the moaning and praying of the natives," reported a white observer who was busily documenting t
he events with his camera, "some chanting the hymns they had learned there, and inwardly blaming the white man for the trouble and destruction, and still hoping [the church] might be saved."4

  With their support beams burned out from under them, Kaumakapili's bells crashed through the church's burning roof to the sanctuary below, sounding "their own dirge, like the harmonious death-wail of some manyvoiced living creature," according to an eyewitness. Many of the fervently religious people watching all this must have thought they were witnessing something akin to an Old Testament visitation. Honolulu's favorite church had become, for all intents and purposes, an avenging bonfire from which a steady spew of sparks and glowing gleeds rode the unrelenting gusts toward thatched roofs and wooden buildings elsewhere in the district. The well-fanned embers, in turn, ignited countless spot fires, often some distance from the church itself and frequently in unexpected or inaccessible places. Though people throughout the area tried their best to extinguish the spot fires, many of the small outbreaks were nearly impossible to reach.'

  The great fire begins: buildings behind Kaumakapili burning out of control and one steeple partly destroyed. Hawaii State Archives

  As the pali winds widened the leading edge of the fire and fanned it toward the center of Chinatown, flames jumped across the street from Kaumakapili Church to another set of densely packed wooden buildings and impassable alleys. That complex ignited quickly, and soon became a second major source of floating embers. Trapped on Beretania Street between the two largest conflagrations, Engine No. i, the newly acquired pride of the Honolulu Fire Department, began to blister from the heat. With their clothes beginning to smolder, the exhausted firefighters operating that engine finally had to abandon the pumper to the flames or be enveloped themselves. As it was, they were saved only when bystanders dragged them to safety. Their comrades carried on as best they could from a safer distance, but the situation was clearly out of control.

  By the time Emerson, Day, and Wood heard about the crisis and rushed over from their regular morning meeting downtown, Kaumakapili Church was fully enveloped and all of the buildings in three adjoining blocks were blazing uncontrollably. The intense heat created updrafts that constantly replenished a huge cloud of flaming debris and glowing embers. Some of the updrafts were strong enough to float flaming straw mattresses several yards above the ground. The firefighters continuously redeployed out ahead of the wind-driven fire, trying desperately to check its advance downward toward the harbor. They threw as much water as their remaining engines could pump at some of the threatened buildings, and dynamited others in an effort to create gaps too wide for the fire to jump. But they could not impede the expanding fire front.

  Chinese, Japanese, and Hawaiian residents of the district tore down buildings with axes and ropes and tried to remove combustible materials from the path of the fire. They also attempted to stamp out small side fires wherever they could safely reach them. But burning debris continued to waft onto roofs in the middle of interior structures, where no one could get at them, and the intense heat prevented close actions of any sort against the fire's advancing face. Members of the fire department made a con certed stand in defense of their own Chinatown district station, known as the chemical engine house, but were unable to save it. By noon, the inferno was essentially on its own, spreading wherever the midday gusts and free-drifting embers impelled it. As the fire raged on, volunteers entered the quarantined district and conducted door-to-door searches, lest anyone become trapped inside buildings.

  Fire spreading across the street from Kaumakapili Church. Hawaii State Archives

  While the downhill drafts pushed the main fire through the center of Chinatown toward Honolulu harbor, the original planned fire had resumed its intended course up the gentle slope above Kaumakapili Church. But no fire equipment remained to check its advance when it reached its intended limits, so it inched slowly onward against the downdrafts, toward a street of commercial buildings that included a warehouse known to contain substantial amounts of kerosene and a large supply of fireworks ready for Chinese New Year, only nine days away. Though people could easily track the almost stately progression of the original fire beyond its intended terminus, they had no direct source of water available and could do nothing to stop it.

  Residents of the area, mostly Japanese and Hawaiian, organized the evacuation of their neighborhood as the up-slope edge of the deliberately advancing fire approached the warehouse. An initial explosion of kerosene drums lifted the roof completely off the warehouse and distributed still more burning debris around the area, where it ignited additional smaller fires. Secondary explosions ripped through crates of fireworks for half an hour before the warehouse finally collapsed in a pile of charred rubble. Several Japanese and Hawaiian families barely escaped a runaway line of flames that accelerated unexpectedly from the vicinity of the warehouse down an alley and through their shanties. Other Japanese and Hawaiian residents selflessly destroyed their own homes to create a firebreak that successfully prevented the flames from continuing on up the slope toward the stylish residences of the Nuuanu Valley.

  Downwind from the center of the fire, below the smoldering remains of Kaumakapili Church, firefighters continued to do what little they could, while retreating foot by foot toward the ocean. "Volunteers passed buckets of water to the men at the hose nozzle, drenching them constantly, but ... the heat was so terrific that the steam arose in white clouds from the men." Many observers noted later that most of the firefighters were blistered across their faces and hands; some were burned quite badly. Volunteers and residents shuttled infants, the elderly, and infirm people to safe areas on the edges of Chinatown, where their cries of terror, in the words of a Chinese witness, "shocked the earth." Two Chinese men who were unconscious from opium smoking were rescued just before their building collapsed upon them.'

  To the spontaneous applause of onlookers, electric company linemen risked their own lives to climb poles and bring potentially lethal live wires safely to ground, lest the writhing and melting coils fall among the increasingly desperate crowds rushing through the streets. Shortly thereafter, Hawaiian Electric cut all current to downtown Honolulu, adding to the chaos of the afternoon by disabling electric water pumps, leaving the telephone company without switchboards, and darkening offices; but the decision probably saved lives inside Chinatown.'

  By 2:30 the strong winds that continued to gust down the face of the volcanic slopes above Honolulu had spread the fire several blocks to the east and west of Kaumakapili Church and driven its leading edge five blocks south, to within a few hundred feet of the city's main harbor. There the fire threatened the principal shipping wharves of this international trading city, as well as several small factories, various warehouses, City Mill, and the Honolulu Iron Works. Next to City Mill a large supply of re cently cut lumber, which had been neatly stacked beside the wharves, caught fire and burned quickly. That fire, in turn, ignited the main building of City Mill, which the three physicians had spared on appeal only the day before. Members of the Board, who were standing by as this took place, issued an ad hoc order to volunteers and firefighters to spare no effort in trying to save City Mill because they realized they would need it more than ever in order to build relocation camps. But the mill burned completely. When Chung Kun Ai reached the scene, he wept. His newly purchased machinery-not yet even paid for-was twisted and molten, resembling puddles of "lava stone," and he assumed he was ruined."

  View from a downtown building as Chinatown burns in the background, with refugees trickling out. Hawaii State Archives

  A group of citizen volunteers and firefighters tried but failed to save the Murray Carriage Factory adjacent to City Mill, but fortunately none of the dozens of cans of oil inside the factory exploded. When the fire then began to turn along the waterfront toward the commercial heart of the city, white merchants in the crowds that had massed along Nuuanu Street began hiring bystanders to help them evacuate their own merchandise to safer ground. Frantic ship
captains, fearful of the steady shower of burning embers landing on their decks, and realizing that the main fire would soon reach the shoreline, desperately worked to disentangle the lines that held their vessels to the city's wharves, so they could move to the safety of open water.

  To reach the center of the city, the fire would have to pass through the buildings and grounds of the Honolulu Iron Works, something the firefighters and all of the Iron Works' two hundred employees were bent upon preventing. The factory had some key advantages over other structures in the Chinatown area. The outer buildings of the Iron Works were brick, providing the rest of the plant with something of a fire-retardant barricade. Before the fire reached them, the Iron Works' employees removed most combustible materials from the grounds. And most importantly, the Iron Works stood immediately adjacent to the seawall. In addition to the fire department's hose lines, employee-manned bucket brigades could help defend major structures, and waterborne fire-fighting equipment could be deployed.

  Out in the harbor were two working ships with fire-fighting equipment on board, the U.S.S. Iroquois and U.S.S. Eleu. The city's small harbor dredge was towed away from the seawall, making room for the two larger vessels to pick their way against the parade of retreating ships and position themselves close to the seawall. The Eleu tried to keep the lumber mill fire from spreading, while the Iroquois began pumping heavy streams of water into the Iron Works compound, thoroughly soaking its major buildings. So powerful were the beams of water that onlookers felt them rock the buildings' foundations. Combined with the continuing efforts of the land-based firefighters and employee bucket brigades, these ships finally helped halt the great Chinatown fire at the edge of the Honolulu Iron Works. As the sun went down, the fire was burning itself out, the Iron Works were intact, and the rest of downtown Honolulu was out of danger.