On June 15th, 1904 the excursion paddle steamship General Slocum burned on the East River and took an estimated 1,021 lives with her. Little Germany was devastated by the disaster as the community was never able to recover from the loss of a quarter of its residence. The second deadliest Maritime accident in the history of the United States was the result of a poorly funded regulatory agency that was unable to do its job and prevent the certification of an unseaworthy vessel.
The Slocum departed the pier with an estimated 1,321 souls onboard, the vast majority were women and children. While the first part of her trip went smoothly, an undetected fire smoldered in the ship’s forward lamp room. It wasn’t until the steamer crossed Hell’s Gate that smoke had started to billow out from between the deck planks and the edges of the hatch; and of course it was a small group of boys who first noticed the fire situation.
One child raced off to the wheelhouse to inform captain William Van Schaik, another found the nearest deckhand. The deckhand had no training on fire safety, so he approached the hatch and opened it; this introduced a fresh supply of oxygen into the confined space. What had been a manageable smoldering blaze now had the fuel it needed to become the inferno that would destroy the wooden ship.
Van Schaik was unaware of the flames that had started to consume his command, until a small voice called out; “Hey mister, the ships on fire!”
It took only took few seconds for the captain to notice the smoke that billowed off of the Slocum’s starboard bow. But once he did he was faced with a horrific choice. As the skipper saw it, he either could pull his command up to New York City’s flammable (and poorly maintained) docks…or he could make a full speed run to the infectious disease hospital on North Brother Island.
He chose the latter.
Over the next 30 minutes the Slocum ran headlong into the wind which pushed the fire aft. Desperate parents broke life jackets free of their enclosures only for the 13 year old canvas to disintegrate which spread cork dust and lead bars across the deck. The few life jackets that were somewhat usable still were filled with that same dust, which had the same density as wet cement when soaked, and those lead bars.
These parents would attach these few usable jackets to their children, toss them overboard and watched with horror as their kids never resurfaced.
As children were tossed to their deaths, a flotilla of tugs, barges, and steamships formed in the wake of the burning steamer. There were only a few passengers that knew how to swim, and an even smaller number that found usable flotation devices. This meant that passengers were trapped between a wind fed fire that marched aft and a river current that even experienced swimmers still struggle with.
The crews’ attempt to fight the blaze were futile as the first standpipe was blocked and no water came out of the fire hose. When they hooked up to the second standpipe, the water pressure destroyed the tattered 13 year old hose and they were unable to hook up another one to the pipe because the hose connector was still attached to the pipe; this meant l the crew was unable to remove it and attach another hose.
All that was left was for those on board was to hold on until the ship ran aground at North Brother Island; which wasn’t the refuge it was expected to be when the bow plowed into the shore because it left the stern out in the water that was too deep for passengers to wade to shore. This left a handful of brave captains or crew from the flotilla to jump on their own lifeboats or whale boats.
They were only able to rescue a few before the paint on their small boats started to bubble and crack. Some of the wooden boats started to smolder in the heat which forced them to pull away or risk losing their own lives along with the lives of those they’d saved.
Nurses and doctors in the hospital saw the pyre as it headed for North Brother Island. They had raced down to the beach and arrived just as the steamer wrecked on their shore. As survivors staggered from the ship, or were brought ashore by the rescuers, they were immediately treated to the best ability of the staff.
The disaster came to an end when the vertical columns burned through and the Slocum’s super structure crashed into the hull which made it easy to put out the fire and begin to recovery the bodies that were still on board or had drifted ashore.
It would later emerge that the that the lifeboats onboard the Slocum‘s lifeboats had been unusable, because 13 years of layer after layer after layer of dried paint had glued the boats into their v chocks.
St. Marks Evangelical Lutheran Church had booked the side wheel paddle steamer for its annual summer excursion. And now its congregation was decimated through no fault of its own. The remaining residents of Little Germany would move out of the neighborhood within the next decade; that left next to no one to commemorate the anniversary as the survivors scattered.
The fire, and the lives lost, drifted from the public memory.
Aftermath
The original death toll was tallied at 950, but the Knickerbocker Steamship Company never required their skippers to keep a passenger manifest, neither did federal law. Modern estimates based off the missing, and recovered bodies put the death toll at 1,021; even with the original death toll the fire on the Slocum had become the deadliest maritime accident of the 20th century (until the Titanic sank in 1912); the second deadliest maritime accident in US history; the deadliest man made disaster in NYC (until 9/11/2001); and the deadliest maritime disaster in New York State.
Outrage rippled across the country as the story spread. Especially once it became clear that the United States Steamboat Inspection Service had certified the doomed steamer about a month before she burned; yet the survivors testimony immediately painted a picture of a ship that was not safe to sail on.
President Teddy Roosevelt immediately convened an investigation. That investigation would conclude that Van Schaik had failed to conduct boat and fire drills, that the inspectors never tested the fire hoses or the other life saving apparatuses as they were supposed to, the Knickerbocker Steamship Co. had never replaced the life jackets once they expired, and that Slocum’s design was conductive to the spread of fire…especially once her skipper pointed her bow into the wind during the full ahead sprint to beach on North Brother Island.
Roosevelt personally fired the two inspectors who’d certified the doomed steamer as seaworthy. Meanwhile, Congress passed a slew of new fire safety requirements for ship design; and Captain William Van Schaik was convicted for his negligence in not immediately beaching his ship at the busy piers, and never hosting the drills he was required to under law.
Not one of Van Schaik’s bosses faced any charges for their negligence and refusal to keep the General Slocum’s safety equipment up to date.
The life jacket manufacturers were left legally untouched for their decision to pad their products’ weight with lead – federal regulations had a minimum weight requirement for life jackets and the cork & canvas were too light.
In 1912, President William Howard Taft pardoned Van Shaik due to his advanced age and health concerns.
Lessons unlearned
It’s easy to pin the blame entirely on the two inspectors for certifying a ship that was obviously unseaworthy, and her skipper for letting her deteriorate. But the three men who bore all of the consequences for the 1,021 lives that were lost were the scapegoats for a company that refused to invest in safety and a regulatory agency that was stretched thin.
The USSIS operated on a shoestring budget compared to its peer regulatory agencies in the UK, France, Germany, and even Spain. This meant that the inspectors received no class room training before they went out into the field to shadow the more experienced inspectors. It also meant that their training only lasted a couple of weeks, which left them ill equipped to actually do the job in the face of pressure from crews desperate to get their ships back out to sea.
Another factor that set up the steamboat inspectors for failure was the fact that they were paid based off of the number of inspections completed, not hours worked or with a fixed annual salary.
The result was a churn to ensure that they got through the number of inspections needed to get paid a living wage. It had become standard practice for these inspectors to step onboard and ensure that the minimum number of life jackets and lifeboats were present before they signed off on the boat and headed to their next inspection. For the few inspectors that filed reports about ships that were out of compliance, it was an uphill battle to get their agency to actually enforce their citations; and, often enough, those citations were waived by headquarters.
Unfortunately, it had become glaringly clear that the USSIS was hamstrung and ineffective five years after its founding (28 years before the Slocum fire) when the aged paddle wheeler Pacific sank in a handful of minutes off the Washington State coast in 1876. Local papers immediately raised concerns about the age of the merchant marine fleet once the two survivors had told their story.
Those warnings went unheeded, and even the Slocum’s true lessons were lost as the USSIS continued to bumble along until its duties were folded into the Coast Guard during World War II.
And even the CG is hamstrung by similar budgetary constraints when it comes to inspections. The cargo shipping industry (even to this day) manages a lot of its own certifications for compliance with the International Standards for Safety of Life at Sea and federal regulations. While there have been some tightening of regulations and inspections – especially after the SS Marine Electric sank with 31 of her 34 crew members in 1983 – the reality is the Coast Guard doesn’t have the budget or man power to be able to ensure compliance with regulations – see the 2008 sinking of the FV Alaskan Ranger as a more modern example.
Even when you step away from the maritime industry, Congress’s refusal to fully fund our regulatory agencies has grabbed even bigger headlines thanks to dramatic death tolls.
The NTSB report into the January, 2025 fatal midair collision over the Potomac River called out the FAA for its lack of oversight in ensuring that military flights stayed below the height limit for the area.
Then there’s also the 737 MAX crashes where the reliance on self certification allowed Boeing to hide the MCAS software from the FAA, the airlines, and the pilots until a pair of high profile crashes in Indonesia and Ethopia in 2018.
Or there’s the Douglas Corporation certifying that the DC10 cargo doors initial design for the locking mechanism was safe and that the loss of the door wouldn’t impact the aircraft’s safe operation. This is despite the fact that a cargo door had failed during a 1970 pressure test, which caused the floor to collapse and ripped apart the hydraulics and control cables that gave the pilots control over the vertical and horizontal stabilizers.
This pressure test failure came to light when Congress got ahold of the Applegate memo during its investigation into the FAA’s gentleman’s agreement with Douglas that circumvented the NTSB’s recommendations after a nearly empty DC10, American Airlines flight 96, had its cargo doors fail and the floor partially collapse over Windsor, Ontario. Enough of the cables and lines were intact that the pilots managed to preform an emergency landing with no loss of life, or the aircraft’s hull.
To retrofit the existing DC10s, and the ones under construction, with the new locking mechanism and the floor vents that were recommended after the near miss would have cost Douglas millions. The FAA agreed and created a compromise that included a hole in the cargo doors that allowed the ground techs to ensure the lock was secure, and a placard in English that explained what said hole was for.
Which proved completely useless two years later when a fully booked Turkish Airlines flight 981 took off from Orly Airport in Paris. The lock failed, the floor collapsed into the cargo hold which completely severed the cables and destroyed the pilots ability to fly their aircraft. All 335 passengers and crew were killed when the DC10 slammed into the forest.
The fact that the FAA wasn’t aware of the failed pressure test from 1970 in and of itself is damming of how Congress oversees our regulatory agencies; but the fact that Richard Nixon’s FAA director elected to accommodate the corporation despite the dire safety warnings from the NTSB highlights a lesson that America refuses to learn.
Companies are going to prioritize their profits no matter the cost in human lives. That means we need fully staffed, trained, and funded regulatory agencies to ensure that our safety is protected. But to fund these agencies to that level would mean taxes on the rich and mega corporations that need this oversight the most – in particular Amazon’s distribution centers and the horrific deaths that have occurred their because state and federal regulatory agencies are too strung out to perform spot inspections.
Unfortunately, the mythology around our country’s founding has taught us taxes are bad and need to be avoided. Which is a giant hill we have to climb if we actually want to break the strangle hold these companies have on our lives.
More from the Evergreen Post Intelligencer
- Sloppy defense doomed Cougars soccer to its first loss against Idaho since ’99
- Unincorporated Snohomish County to have $20 car tab in order to fund Public Works road repairs
- Lynnwood City Council approved the long-term water plan, critical area ordinance
- Snohomish County Council passed the 0.1% public safety sales tax
- LPD chief briefed the council on how the department will use the public safety grant, sales tax
- Union treasurer Burgess appointed to fill vacancy on Lynnwood PFD board
Discover more from Evergreen Post Intelligencer
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
