Untitled
Photograph
Untitled
From Worcester Fire Department
1999
Gelatin silver print
Image: 6 11/16 × 10 in. (17 × 25.4 cm)
Paper: 8 3/8 × 10 15/16 in. (21.3 × 27.8 cm)
Gift of an anonymous donor, 2018
2018.0120.0050
Inscriptions Printed in ink on applied label on verso, TC: [printed numbers and barcode] \ © Bruce Davidson / Magnum Photos \ USA. Worcester Fire Department \ USA. Massachusetts. 1999. On December 3rd 1999 the fire in Worcester started with a candle in an abandoned warehouse. It ended with \ temperatures above 3000 degrees and the men of the Worcester fire department in a fight for their lives. The fire killed 6 men. The family of \ Joe McGuirk. From left: Linda, Emily, and Everett. In mid-July 1994, back when Joe was working as a contractor, he started building his own \ twenty-five-hundred-square-foot house. He finished the framing before the month was out and moved in by November. When Joe set his \ mind to something, he got it done. He became a Worcester firefighter in 1997. The warehouse was his first big fire. ©Bruce \ Davidson/Magnum Photos \ The Worcester fire is the country's second deadliest this decade in terms of firefighters killed. On July 6, 1994, 14 firefighters died battling a \ blaze on South Canyon mountain near Glenwood Springs, Colo. \ The blaze seemed so non-threatening that firefighters didn't bother to put on their masks as they swept through the Worcester Cold Storage \ and Warehouse shortly after 6:15 p.m. on Dec.3, 1999. Soon, all that would change. The building would quickly envelop the men inside with \ thick, boiling smoke, poisonous fumes and fmales that would reach more than 3,000 degree before he horrible night ended. \ Six Worcester firefighters -- Lt. Thomas E. Spencer, Lt. James F. Lyons, Paul A. \ Brotherton, Jeremiah M. Luckey, Timothy P. Jackson and Joseph T. McGuirk --never made it out alive. District Fire Chief Michael O. \ McNamee, who would later call the abandoned warehouse "the building from hell," said he had never seen conditions deteriorate so rapidly \ in 27 years on the job. \ The fire had started earlier in the afternoon when a homeless couple, Julie Ann Barnes and Thomas LEvesque, knocked over a candle during \ an argument. They ran out of the building when they couldn't put out the flames. They never reported the fire. Firefighters frantically \ searched the upper floors of teh warehouse, looking for the homeless people they had heart were living inside. They never found them
Inscribed in pencil on applied label on verso, TL: E19648
Printed in ink on applied label on verso, BR: 44441 [66]
Inscribed in pencil on applied label on verso, TL: E19648
Printed in ink on applied label on verso, BR: 44441 [66]
