The Longest Minute by Matthew J. Davenport

Author:Matthew J. Davenport
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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At this hour, late in the morning on Thursday, roughly thirty hours into the citywide fire, there was still no uniform plan or prevailing strategy for stopping the fire or even a centralized command or guidance for the distinct groups of firefighters, soldiers, and volunteers still fighting the flames on multiple fronts. With no firebox communication possible, strategy was devised at each fire line, where engine companies coordinated with other companies on which hydrants worked or which cisterns had water. One of the only top-level decisions on battling the blaze had been the previous day’s call for dynamiting firebreaks, but even then, Mayor Schmitz and Abe Ruef had limited demolitions to buildings already in contact with flames, all but eliminating the tactic’s effectiveness. And it was unclear who was in charge of explosives or the crews handling them. In some places, firemen were ordered by civilians to join with soldiers in commandeered vehicles to haul explosives or destroy certain buildings. In other places, civilians were ordered by soldiers to drive explosives in their own automobiles or wagons or to evacuate a home selected for demolition. Mayor Schmitz would issue orders to blow certain streets or blocks based often on stale information, and by the time his orders were carried out, it was too late to make a difference. Fire battalion chiefs told soldiers where to haul dynamite, soldiers told firemen where to blow buildings, and firemen told soldiers where to backfire.

Even those in charge did not know who was in charge. Fire had forced General Funston to move his headquarters once, and Mayor Schmitz twice, and neither had yet met with the other personally. Soldiers had been ordered by General Funston the previous morning to act under the orders of the mayor or the police department or the fire department, but by nightfall he had placed soldiers west of Van Ness Avenue under a colonel’s command and left those to the east assigned to police and fire departments “in keeping order and in fighting the fire.” And added to these split forces were guardsmen and ROTC cadets and sailors and marines, most acting under the orders of whichever general or colonel or city official they had last encountered.

In his relocated headquarters in the North End Police Station on Washington Street, Mayor Schmitz acted in the belief that he had authority over all troops in the city, without differentiating—or perhaps without always grasping the distinction—between state national guardsmen (“militia”) or active-duty soldiers (“regulars”). After deciding to try to stop the fire at Van Ness Avenue, he sent out an order through a national guard messenger to direct all available guardsmen to clear residents from the avenue and the blocks east and “all the regular troops that could be spared to take charge of the dynamiting” there. The messenger delivered the message up through the chain of command to his brigade commander, Brigadier General Koster, who had arrived the night before and set up headquarters in Jefferson Square, that “the

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