No Escape
by Bob Foreman © 2014
If you read only one Atlanta book this year, make it “The Winecoff Fire” by Sam Heys and Allen B. Goodwin. It is a page-turner, a guided tour through “the worst hotel fire ever--anywhere” and its aftermath, a story which makes one yearn for the happy ending which never arrives.
It was in the wee hours of a Sunday December morning in 1946 that all hell broke loose down at the Hotel Winecoff.
Located on Peachtree across Ellis Street from Davison’s big store and less than a block away from the Roxy, Capitol, Paramount and Loew’s Grand theatres, the Winecoff was touted as “absolutely fireproof” when it was anything but. It lacked fire alarm, fire sprinkler, and fire escape, and when the main (and only) interior stair which wrapped the twin elevators was consumed by flames, there was “absolutely” no exit except through the windows.
First response fireman toting live hoses battled to inch their way up the stairs past floor three, the first guest room level, where the fire had begun. In mere moments, the narrow corridors all the way up to the 16th floor had become infernos as thousand degree flames consumed oxygen from the guest rooms with a roar that sounded “like a locomotive.”
Separated from the firestorm only by smoldering doors and glass transoms, guests became prisoners in their smoke-poisoned rooms. When the heat and smoke became unbearable, tenants climbed outside of their windows, closing them behind, clinging to the infernal machine and praying to Jesus. Those who remained inside suffocated.
Ladder trucks hastily dispatched by the Atlanta Fire Department provided a way out for the majority of the guests whose rooms fronted on Peachtree or Ellis, but the tallest ladder topped off at floor eight.
It was a race against time. Blinding smoke and a barrage of falling window glass, suitcases and human bodies hampered the best efforts of the firemen on Peachtree, a scene of organized chaos. There played the main attraction where desperation drove patrons to stunning acts of courage and acrobatic feats hitherto unimaginable.
Guests like human flies crept across the slender exterior ledge which ran the width of floor 15 so to achieve the cross-ventilated corner suite where death would come last. A number of residents above floor eight successfully clambered down ropes fashioned from their bed sheets to reach the ladders, until the dreaded “flashover” occurred (pictured here) and sliced all of the sheets half in two.
Many leapt to safe targets which they could barely see. A three-year-old boy, thrown clear by his father, dropped 110 feet to a net where he bounced off and flew into the arms of an innocent bystander. Baby lived, daddy died.
Forty percent of the 280 guests perished that night, another twenty percent suffered injuries. In a little over two hours until the last flame was extinguished, 119 souls had met their maker, including forty kids under the age of eighteen, the majority of whom had trained in from country towns on their first visit to the big City. Victims’ ages ranged from one to seventy-six.
“I think I would rather die than go through it again,” said one survivor.
“Winecoff Fire” authors provide ample evidence that the conflagration was the work of a diabolical monster who used arson as a tool for murder, but who intended to take only two lives. Perhaps he also believed the place to be “absolutely fireproof.”
Against all odds, the Winecoff still stands and functions as a hotel.
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