Talk:Holland Tunnel fire

Dodgy claims
One uncertainty in this article is the position of the fire along the length of the tunnel.

Egilsrud (and the other sources who quote the 1949 Board of Fire Underwriters report) state that the truck travelled 2900 feet. The contemporary newspaper source (Engineering News Record) is from a reporter who actually visited the site during its refurbishment, and it states that the truck travelled 1838 feet before starting to burn. If the reporter is correct, this would put the fire on a steeper downgrade(3% downhill instead of 0.25% downhill), and the damaged tunnel ventilation fans would be in the New Jersey Land vent shaft instead of the New Jersey River vent shaft.

Given the pattern of damage (200 feet uphill of the fire site and 500 feet downhill of it), I've chosen the longer distance, because I think that the pattern of damage is more approporate to a shallow gradient (0.25%) than to the steeper one (3%).

To clear this up, input is needed from someone who either:


 * has a copy of the 1949 report,
 * has access to the details of the fan refurbishment program,
 * has walked through the vent ducts and stumbled across significant number of 1940's-style hardhats in the extract duct in zones S4 or zone S2 :-)

Ecb 22:10, Mar 21, 2005 (UTC)
 * I've removed this claim from the end of the "Injuries and damage" section. It simply did not seem encyclopedic and was not supported by any WP:RS.
 * During the period of reconstruction, an unknown number of hats were sucked out through the broken extract duct, and expelled out of the New Jersey vent shaft.
 * --Marc Kupper&#124;talk 19:14, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Port of New York Authority
The Port Authority did not control the Hudson Tubes (later PATH) until 1963, so I'm removing the indication that it controlled "a railroad line" at the time of the fire in 1949. If I'm somehow missing something, feel free to change it back.Mjj237 05:17, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Number of deaths inconsistent
In the introduction it says that one firefighter was killed and 66 other people injured. The info box has the death count at one and the "Injuries and Death" section has "Death," in the singular.

However, in the "Injuries and Death" section, two deaths are in fact mentioned. "One firefighter, Battalion Chief Gunther E. Beake, of FDNY Battalion 3 was severely affected by smoke inhalation and died of his injuries on August 23, 1949. Samuel Williams Sr. a laborer from Philadelphia, was also killed. He died the day of the fire."

Either the second death needs referencing, with the death count changed to two and the grammar pluralised, or the mention of it should be removed! FloweringOctopus (talk) 09:35, 11 May 2024 (UTC)