S.S. Noronic in Toronto, 1930 (Top)
S.S. Noronic on fire with passengers escaping by rope, 1949 (Bottom)
The Noronic was a Great Lakes passenger ship built by the Western Dry Dock and Shipbuildng Company, and launched on June 2nd, 1913 in Port Arthur, Ontario, Canada.
On September 14th, 1949, the Noronic set sail from Detroit, Michigan for a 7-day cruise on Lake Ontario with 524 passengers and 171 crew.
Early on the morning of September 16th, while docked in Toronto Harbor, a passenger noticed smoke seeping from a linen closet and filling the corridor. After notifying a bellboy of the smoke, the bellboy went to check the linen closet, without first sounding the ship’s alarm. Upon opening the closet, flames burst from the closet and set fire to highly combustible wood paneling. As the paneling throughout the ship was oiled wood instead of fireproof materials, the fire had plenty of fuel. Attempting to fight the quickly-spreading flames with fire extinguishers, and then going for the ship’s fire hoses, only to find that they were out of order, they were forced to retreat from the flames entirely. The bellboy ran to notify the captain, and the passenger ran back to his stateroom, grabbed his family, and fled the ship.
Eight minutes after the fire began spreading, at 2:39 a.m., the ship’s alarm was sounded. At this point the fire had already spread to half the ship’s decks. Staircases and corridors were quickly engulfed in flames, cutting off many passengers’ escape routes. The scene quickly descended into panic. Many crew-members ran from the ship as soon as the first alarm sounded, none of the crew tried to wake the sleeping passengers, and none of them had called the fire department.
Many passengers, woken up by the alarm, or by the running and screaming in the corridors, had no choice but to jump overboard. Some passengers jumped from decks that were already on fire. Some of those who escaped the ship were themselves on fire. Some fell into the water and were rescued by people in boats or rafts, and some fell to their deaths on the pier. Some were crushed to death in the narrow corridors as passengers rushed to escape the flames, and some, trapped in their cabins or elsewhere, suffocated from the smoke or were burned to death, possibly even in their sleep. Others who were trapped in their cabins had to be dragged out of the ship through portholes. The rest of the passengers who didn’t fall or jump from the ship, and who weren’t trapped in their cabins or elsewhere in the ship, were able to escape to safety by rope, or on rescue ladders supplied by firemen who were called to the pier by a night watchman.
Twenty minutes after the fire began, the ship’s steel hull began turning white-hot, and the decks began to bend and collapse. After an hour, the ship nearly capsized from being filled with water from the 37 fire hoses trained on it, with the amount of water poured on the burning ship reaching over 1.7 million gallons by the time the fire was put out at 5:00 a.m. After waiting for two hours for the wreckage of the ship to cool, firefighters began searching the burned-out hulk. They found burned skeletons in the corridors, reportedly still embracing each other, and some still in their beds. Many skeletons of the dead were completely incinerated by the fire. The fire also melted and warped the ship’s metal fittings, and melted the glass from all the windows.
In the end, the death toll was never precisely figured. The dead numbered from 118 to 139. Of those who died, only one died from drowning, and none of the dead were crew-members, only passengers. While most of the crew had fled the ship early on, the captain was one of the last of the crew to leave, having rescued several passengers himself. Though his license was still suspended for a year, he was still seen as a hero. The fire itself was thought to be caused by a crew-member who dropped a cigarette in the linen closet. Later on it was even suspected by officials of Canada Steamship Lines, the company that owned the Noronic, that the fire was a case of arson. The suspicion was based on the fact that a later fire in 1950 on another CSL ship, the Quebec, was proven to have been intentionally set in one of the ship’s linen closets. The wreck of the Noronic itself was partially dismantled, re-floated, and scrapped completely.
Photos and textual/factual reference: wikipedia/SS_Noronic
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