Wrong place, wrong time: warehouse tragedy in Cheapside, Glasgow

摘要

As fires go, it was said to be the most expensive peace time fire since the Great Fire of London in 1666. The final cost, not as precisely calculated as perhaps would be the case today, was put between £5 million and £10 million. It destroyed millions of gallons of whisky held in storage and over 1,300 tons of tobacco on which duty alone would have been over £8 million. Two brand-new turntable ladders (TLs) were lost in the fire, valued at £13,000 each, a fortune in those days, and - most tragically - Glasgow Fire Brigade and Glasgow Salvage Corps suffered the loss of 19 of their own in what remains the worst peacetime fire in terms of operational deaths in the UK. Yet it could have been even worse: the warehouse fire had the potential to extend into a conflagration, devastating large parts of Glasgow's essential dock area. In what was surely one of the most heroic demonstrations of true resilience of any fire service, the Glasgow firefighters, supported by surrounding brigades, regrouped and contained the fire despite the knowledge of the personal and professional tragedy they were witnessing.