PS General Slocum — A Church Outing Burned on the East River, ~1,021 Dead

On the morning of 15 June 1904, the excursion paddle steamer PS General Slocum caught fire on New York City’s East River while carrying a chartered church outing, and burned so fast that an estimated 1,021 of the roughly 1,342 people aboard died. The dead were overwhelmingly the women and children of St Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, a German-immigrant congregation from Manhattan’s Little Germany, bound for a picnic on Long Island. It was the deadliest day in New York City’s history until the September 2001 attacks, and the worst loss of life on American inland waters.

The Slocum was a wooden-hulled sidewheel steamer built in 1891, about 264 feet long, operated by the Knickerbocker Steamship Company. She had been chartered for the day. A fire broke out forward, in a lamp room or storage compartment packed with combustible material, and spread through the dry wooden vessel within minutes. The captain, William Van Schaick, kept the ship moving upriver into a headwind that fanned the flames rather than running her immediately aground, and steered for North Brother Island some distance ahead. By the time she beached, the fire had consumed much of the vessel.

What turned a fire into a mass-casualty disaster was the state of the ship’s life-saving equipment and the unpreparedness of her crew. The cork life preservers were more than a decade old and had rotted; many disintegrated or, weighted and waterlogged, dragged people under rather than holding them up. The six lifeboats were inaccessible — reportedly wired and painted in place — and could not be launched. The fire hose was cheap and rotten and burst when pressure was applied. The crew had never been drilled and abandoned the firefighting effort. Over all of this sat the federal Steamboat-Inspection Service, whose inspector had recently certified the decayed equipment as sound.

The disaster was investigated by a US Commission of Investigation appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt, which reported in October 1904. It found a chain of organisational and oversight failures: defective and decayed equipment, an untrained crew, the master’s failure to beach the ship promptly, and the inspection service’s failure to do its job. Eight people were indicted; only Captain Van Schaick was convicted, sentenced in 1906 to ten years for failing to maintain the fire drills and equipment the law required. The disaster drove a tightening of federal steamboat-safety regulation.