The Pittsburgh Press (February 10, 1942)
Welder’s torch blamed –
Fire-blacked Normandie overturns
FBI probes sabotage possibility as Navy plans repairs
By Robert Musel, United Press staff writer
New York –
Navy engineers inspected the buckled plates and scorched decks of the liner Normandie today as the vessel, renamed the USS Lafayette for war conversion, lay helplessly on her side in the ice-clogged Hudson River.
Fireboats still poured water on the sprawling hulk and quenched one smoldering remnant of the fire which broke out on the $60-million vessel yesterday.
As Navy engineers examined the Normandie for resumption of the enormous task of converting her, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation questioned survivors of the fire.
Sparks ignite kapok
The Navy and New York Fire Departments officially attributed the fire to a welder’s acetylene torch, which an eyewitness said had sprayed sparks onto highly inflammable kapok, a hairy material used in construction work. Sabotage was not definitely ruled out, however, since the FBI had not completed its investigation.
Navy officers denied a wave of waterfront rumors about sabotage, disorders among workmen, and even that the ship could not be salvaged.
Fire officials who helped direct the long battle to save the world’s second largest vessel from the fury of a five-alarm fire estimated that loss might amount to $5 million. But naval officers were more concerned about the time lost in conversion of the 83,000-ton liner.
Liner top-heavy
During the night, thousands of tons of water had been poured onto the vessel. The fire was extinguished, except for a few smoldering portions in remote portions of its great interior, but the weight of the water left the liner top-heavy on the incoming tide.
Twelve hours after the blaze started, the Normandie rolled gently away from her dock early today until her port side rested on the silty bottom.
Immediately fire blazed again from the seared interior of her superstructure, but it was extinguished in 40 minutes and the weary hundreds of naval and municipal firefighters, who had battled to save her since yesterday afternoon, left her to the engineers who must solve the monumental problem of righting her.
Stacks barely above water
The ship was a sad sight as dawn revealed her a crippled hulk.
A third of her superstructure and bridge were underwater and her three giant stacks and her masts a few feet above the water of the ice-choked pier.
But there was some good news to allay the disaster of the accidental fire which raged in her decks for three hours and finally resulted in her turning over on her side. One of her former French officers said she could undoubtedly be righted and repaired – and with a speed that would surprise laymen.
Rear Adm. Adolphus Andrews, Commandant of the 3rd Naval District, said that there was no possibility of the fire having been set by saboteurs.
Censorship invoked
Naval censorship prohibited a too-detailed account of the damage, but it was permissible to say that the fire damage was entirely confined to the three upper decks, that the interior of her hull had been sealed by her watertight doors and bulkheads and remained dry even while she was partly underwater, that she remained structurally intact, both above and below the main deck.
The French officer, who, because his status in this country is that of a deportable alien, refused to be quoted by name, said that the disaster would have been infinitely worse if water had got below her main deck to the great electric engines, the mammoth generators, the many banks of boilers.
Intricate machinery saved
He said it would have taken months to repair water damage to this highly intricate machinery, but that righting her, while a difficult engineering problem, could be accomplished in a fraction of that time.
Adm. Andrews left the scene at 3:30 a.m., after losing a dramatic and heartrending battle to keep her 80,000-ton bulk upright. Tons of water had been poured into her superstructure. It froze into the great masses of ice on her upper decks and bulkheads.
With the interior of the hull sealed to keep water from flooding the engine rooms, she was grotesquely top-heavy by the time the fire was controlled at 7:40 p.m. and was listing 12 degrees away from the pier.
Pump efforts fail
Efforts to pump accumulated water from the upper decks failed: it had solidified too quickly into ice in -20º temperatures. And the tide was coming in, gently pushing at her great sides.
Slowly, hour by hour, she tilted more and more. Tugboats were rushed into the pier to push against her; more hawsers were stretched between her and the pier. But the hawsers snapped and the tugboats had to be called back lest they be crushed.
By 1 a.m., her degree of list was 28 degrees and it seemed she would flop over at any second. By 2 a.m., she was 38 degrees off true and only the river silt which had banked around her keel during the months she had been tied to the pier kept her from flopping. Degree by degree, she slumped down, and finally at 2:39 a.m. slipped flat into the water, so gently there was hardly a ripple.
Admiral disappointed
Adm. Andrews’ tired face reflected his disappointment and he left the scene without making a statement.
The French officer said:
Our beautiful ship will sail again.
Unashamed, he permitted tears to course his cheeks:
But how, oh how, could the Americans have permitted her to burn?
That question will be dealt with by a naval board of inquiry which was expected to be formed within a few days to establish responsibility.
Most fireproof vessel
The French officer pointed out a well-known fact: the Normandie, of all the passenger vessels afloat, is probably the most fireproof and the most elaborately equipped to detect and fight fires. She was built immediately after a series of disastrous fires had destroyed prize ships of the French Merchant Marine – the L’Atlantique, the Paris, and the first Lafayette. Therefore, her designers and builders were particularly conscious of fire danger.
The walls of all her interior rooms were built of duralumin covered with asbestos. Every room was a self-contained unit, from which, theoretically, if all doors were closed, a fire could not break out.
There was a hole in the ceiling of each room to permit the introduction of a hose with which to flood it. Each cabin and room had a thermostat through which any abnormal increase in temperature was registered on a central board. They also automatically closed ventilators to cut off drafts that might spread a fire.
Yet the sparks thrown from an acetylene torch manipulated by a workman in the main lounge set the fire shortly after 2 p.m. yesterday. The fire was completely out of control within 10 minutes. One man was killed and 104 were injured, most of them slightly.
Establishing how and where the ship was fired, Adm. Andrews said the sparks apparently ignited several bales of kapok, a fibrous composition used to stuff life preservers. He declined to discuss how the fire had spread so rapidly.
His subordinates said every precaution had been taken against fire by the 300 Navy and 600 Coast Guard men who were aboard the ship, charged with protecting it from every danger.
Civilian workers aboard
In addition, there were 800 civilian workmen aboard, converting the former luxury liner to her new role as a naval auxiliary.
Not until 11 minutes after the fire broke out was New York City firefighting equipment summoned and within an hour, three fireboats were at the pier and 15 fire trucks were on the elevated highway along the Hudson River and in the street below, pumping water onto the three upper decks.
Meanwhile, a naval officer had used the loudspeaker system, originally used to urge the visitors of departing passengers to go ashore at sailing time, to order all aboard to leave.
Some 50 men lost their heads and leaped into the icy Hudson, from which they were rescued. The others left by the gangplank and by a long ladder extended from the street to the prow by firemen.
Of the damage caused by fire and weather, Fire Chief Patrick J. Walsh said:
It is slight considering the magnitude of the fire and the size of the ship.
Neither was qualified to pass on what damage had been caused by her sliding over onto her side, though it was pointed out that because she went over by inches into the soft ooze of the river bottom, it could have caused no structural damage. It was also pointed out that the Navy would hardly rebuild the interior of the superstructure in the elaborate and costly way the French had built it originally for the passenger trade.
Days are what count
On the subject of damage, Lt. Ernest Lee Jahncke Jr., aide of Adm. Andrews and the son of a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, said:
Nowadays it is not how many million dollars, but how many days are lost.
Naval censorship prohibited any estimate in that regard.
The dead man was Frank Trentacosta, a laborer, who succumbed to a skull fracture several hours after being carried off the ship. The hospitalized injured were suffering mostly from smoke poisoning.
Normandie survivors tell how ship became ‘inferno’
New York (UP) –
Survivors of the fire which swept the former French luxury liner Normandie – many of them overcome by the intense heat and smoke of the blaze and others frostbitten by the freezing spray from fire hoses – pieced together the story of the disaster today.
Charles T. Collins, 18, an ironworker, said he saw the fire start. He said:
I was working on a chain gang. We had a chain around some pillars and were easing them out when they were cut through. Two men were operating an acetylene torch. About 30 or 40 men were working in the room and there were bales and bales of inflammable material.
Spark hits bales
A spark hit one of the bales, and the fires began.
Former Alderman Edward J. Sullivan, employed by a linoleum concern, was aboard on business. He said:
I was in the grand salon on the promenade deck. Several welders were cutting down decorative steel columns with acetylene torches, they had large shields to protect their clothing. About 40 feet away were 150 bales of what appeared to me to be excelsior, but what I now understand was hemp or kapok.
Suddenly there was smoke and flame. I walked to the door. It couldn’t have taken me 10 seconds, but in that time the whole deck seemed to burst into flames.
Sailors’ story
Four Negro sailors, routed from their bunks when the ship’s public address system blared a warning, told of seeing “little fires started unaccountably.”
One said:
We were on B deck and shot up as fast we could. In going up, we saw little fires break out here and there just as though some went around with a torch and lighted them. It was like pouring gasoline on a place and then touching a match to it.
Maybe it wasn’t sabotage, but it was damn funny, it seemed to hit us without warning.
Fatality witnessed
George Deighan saw the only fatality of the disaster. The dead man was Frank Trentacosta of Brooklyn.
We were up forward on D deck about 2:30 when we were ordered to go to the top deck aft. It was all smoke. I was going down a ladder with Trent behind me when there was an explosion.
There wasn’t much noise or flame but a terrific concussion. I think it was a feeder tank for the [welders’] torches. Trent was blasted right over my head and landed on the deck below. I went down and carried him off.
Frozen to ladder
Joseph Centola, 32, a shipfitter, was frozen to an iron ladder and was chopped free by firemen. He said:
I was coming down a ladder and my pants froze. They formed a silly looking L shape. Then my hands froze right to the ladder. I was stuck there. The firemen had to come and chop me away.
Francis Dieck, 26, said several bottles of acetylene had been placed on the promenade deck shortly before the fire started, he agreed the blaze must have started in the salon on that deck. He said:
No one could have held it. It spread too fast.
Normandie fire ‘tip’ ignored
Reporter found sabotage precautions lacking
New York (UP) –
The newspaper PM revealed today that on Jan. 3, its reporter, Edmund Scott, after a personal investigation of the waterfront, had written a story that would have told:
…any agent or crackpot firebug just how to go about setting the Normandie afire, just how easy it would be.
Because this story was “a blueprint for sabotage,” PM did not print it, but told Capt. Charles H. Zeerfoss, chief of the Anti-Sabotage Division of the U.S. Maritime Commission:
…that we had discovered sabotage of war cargoes and ships would be a cinch, that we actually had a reporter working on a U.S. ship of vital importance to the war.
PM’s story today continued:
Capt. Zeerfoss didn’t even ask the name of the ship. He just said:
Better get your reporter out of there before he gets shot.
Original story published
PM then published the story which Mr. Scott wrote on Jan. 3. Mr. Scott’s story began:
For the last two days, I have been wandering all over the SS Lafayette, once the Normandie. I have been lighting imaginary fires. I have been planting imaginary bombs. I have succeeded in “destroying” a dozen times over, the second biggest ship in the world.
Mr. Scott said he dressed in typical longshoreman’s working clothes and wandered around the waterfront seven days, to learn his way around and get into the International Longshoremen’s Union, which has a closed shop contract with the steamship lines.
Pays initiation fee
At the office of Local 824 of the union, he said, he applied for membership, saying he had lost his job in a brass factory because of priorities. No questions were asked. The delegate merely said it would cost him $26.
This represented a reduction in the usual fee. A new member is usually charged a $100 initiation fee and $13.50 for three months’ dues, in advance. He returned the next day with the money, he said, and exchanged it for a membership book.
He was unsuccessful in getting a job the first few days. Finally, he said, the delegate asked him if he was “in trouble.” He said he was, and the delegate advised him not to use his right name, he wrote, the delegate then agreed to help him get a job and got him one aboard the Normandie, to help unload her furniture.
Little scrutiny
At a pier window, he gave his name and Social Security number and the number of the brass tag the boss stevedore had given him, that was all the identification required, all the scrutiny he got, he wrote.
There was no supervision of stevedores and no watching them while they worked, he said, and he was quickly taught by the others how to “stall.” While smoking was prohibited, he, in common with his colleagues, merely locked themselves in staterooms or toilets and smoked.
On the second day, he said, he locked himself into six different toilers on A and C decks for 15 minutes each time. He saw 20 open barrels of excelsior at one place on the ship and wandered among them, unmolested and even unseen. He said:
I could have dropped a lighted match in every one of the barrels without being seen by anyone.
