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Salem eyes firefighting museum
Sunday, July 13, 2008
By Randall Clark rclark@sjnewsco.com
SALEM Just across the street from the hulking steel beams and heavy machinery of this Salem County town’s multi-million construction project, local volunteers toil away at their own labor of love.

The Salem Fire Museum on East Broadway, once a bustling station of the Union Fire Co. in the days when horses pulled tankers, was on its way to becoming yet another relic of the city’s former glory.

But a group of dedicated firefighters and local union workers are putting in countless volunteer hours to keep alive the memories of an entire department.

The remodeling and renovating reach from the front to the back and top to bottom of the two-story building, according to Robert Klein, a Salem City firefighter and retired electrical technician who put in 36 years at nearby Mannington Mills.

Donated materials and artifacts for the museum are already piling up on the second floor, despite a great deal of work still left to be done there.

“The place was falling apart,” Klein said, looking at the peeling paint along one wall. “Everything was going to pieces, the roof was leaking real bad. The walls were in poor shape. It was a mess.”

Klein, who is spearheading the effort, said the building was an active firehouse until approximately 12 years ago. Involved with the project for about three years, he said that work at the site started with gutting the building down to the bare walls.

“Within the last two and a half years is when we started putting things back in and started to make it look like something,” Klein said.

Supplies have been donated from various organizations and companies, or generated from different fundraising activities over the last five or six years, Klein said. He says he doesn’t know how he could even estimate how much the project has cost in materials and labor.

Hundreds of hours have been put in by members of Carpenters Local 542, who offered their talents at no cost.

“We’ve been doing some work the past year and we have more to come,” said Sam Carmon, president of Local 542. “We’ve been involved in the community for years, out in the public giving back to our friends and neighbors.”

For these volunteers, it is work done after hours, according to union pipefitter Dan Mailley.

“It became a whole bigger undertaking when these guys came, a lot you can’t see now that the drywall’s covering it,” Mailley said. “These young guys giving up their Friday nights they have wives and girlfriends at home, but they are here. It tells a lot about these guys.”

The building has been completely rewired electrically, with new duct work and heating/cooling systems. The floors are being rebuilt, drywalls installed and the ceilings are getting spackled and painted.

George Ahl is going to build a fireplace where one window in the back has rotted out, Klein said, and the plumbing has been addressed. Although it is unclear when the project will be completed, it is going to be a proud symbol of the city, according to workers.

Klein scans over a fire broom that was once used to beat brush fires out, and explains the trappings of an old ventilation system that appears to be from the World War I era with some of the original dust. The gear will eventually fill the museum.

“I gotta keep moving this stuff out of everybody’s way, and it keeps coming in,” Klein said. “This stuff is no longer even in the fire service … but it’s definitely part of our history. This is where it belongs.”

Weeklong inferno
Saturday, July 12, 2008
The Jersey Journal
http://www.nj.com

I t was during the first summer of the 20th Century that the greatest Constable Hook refinery fire raged out of control for a week.

By day, ship captains reported seeing columns of smoke 20 miles at sea. By night, New Yorkers at the Battery could read their newspapers from the glow of the fire in Bayonne that threatened to turn Constable Hook Village into a pile of ashes.

It began late in the evening of July 4, 1900, after the noise of the Independence Day fire-crackers had died down.

A violent thunderstorm had passed over Centerville and the first drops of rain reached Constable Hook as the 11 p.m. whistle signaled the end of the one shift and the start of another at the sprawling Standard Oil plant which adjoined the village.

As homeward-bound plant workers trooped past their plant-bound replacements. A bolt of lightning reached out for the main tank in the center of the Standard Oil tank farm.

The tank’s entire top was sheared off and its wall was slit down to the ground. A section of the shattered tank flew into the air, soared over the embankment and crashed into the paraffin works. A 1,500-pound chunk of red metal shot upward 300 feet in the air before plunging through the roof of the boiler shop 1,000 feet away, ruining the shop’s machinery.

The wall around the tank wasn’t big enough to hold back the 30,000 barrels of oil that gushed from the tank. It poured over the dike to destroy a wax-barreling plant, the boiler shop and six reducing stills, all on the other side of the road. Nine more tanks exploded and began to burn.

Under the headline “Liquid Flame,” the Jersey City News of July 5 reported: “The oil from the exploded tanks swept down the hill on which the works was located. Explosions followed like the crash of artillery as tank after tank exploded.

“Down to the water’s edge it went, spreading like a circle of fire. There was nothing to stay its progress. Even water was no obstacle and from the burning pier (earlier filled with ships) it flowed into the Kill van Kull and floated in smoky wisps of flame into the bay.”

As the village’s two fire companies raced to the scene with their horse-drawn equipment, frightened residents fled their homes. They piled their belongings into wagons, pushcarts and wheel-barrows or on their backs as they headed either for the safety of the “mainland” or to camp out in the meadows north of the village until the danger was over.

Within yards of the tanks was the Bayview Hotel which was used as a lodging house for 50 Standard Oil workers, according to the Jersey City News.

“They ran pell-mell out of the rear, chased by a stream of burning oil which flowed everywhere and consumed the hotel,” the newspaper reported. “Flames flowed around the smaller houses of the works and ran up the sides … as firefighters looked on hopelessly.”

Standard Oil tugs pulled some 50 ships from the piers and they formed a cordon to fight the fire from the waterside. Great boons of logs were tossed in a semi-circle to prevent the burning liquid from reaching other ships in the bay.

On land, trenches were dug around the Standard yards. Firefighters and refinery workers valiantly fought the blazing oil. Unfortunately, fire-fighting foam hadn’t been developed at the time and most of the available fire hydrants were in the center of the village some distance from the center of the blaze. A shortage of hose hampered the fight.

The streams of water used by the firemen merely hissed off the burning tanks and turned into steam. The best they could do was to cool off the adjacent tanks and protect the village from destruction

Hackensack honors five firefighters killed 20 years ago
Posted by jryan July 01, 2008 13:53PM
http://www.nj.com

Officials in Hackensack tonight will honor the five firefighters killed 20 years ago by the deadliest blaze in city history.

The July 1, 1988, fire collapsed the 60-ton ceiling of the Hackensack Ford dealership, killing Capt. Richard L. Williams, 53, Lt. Richard Reinhagen, 48, and firefighters Stephen H. Ennis, 30, William Krejsa, 51, and Leonard Radumski, 38.

Dozens of firefighters, local officials and residents will gather for the 7 p.m. tribute at Hackensack’s Memorial Park.

“They were great guys,” said Dennis Walker, a 28-year veteran of the Hackensack Fire Department. “These are the guys you looked up to, the senior guys ahead of me, the guys I learned from. They were our brothers.”

The ceiling collapsed as the firefighters cut a hole in it and tried to position a hose to battle flames that broke out between the ceiling and the roof.

Two of the firefighters survived the collapse but became trapped in a closet and ran out of air.

HISTORY
The Jersey Journal
http://www.nj.com
Fire destroys industrial complex
Saturday, May 24, 2008
O ne of Bayonne’s worst fires occurred when wind-driven flames swept through an Avenue A Industrial complex that housed a key WWII defense plant.

By the time the general alarm blaze was over on April 20, 1963, all but two of the 19 complexes were destroyed, three nearby homes were reduced to a pile of ashes, 28 people were treated at Bayonne Hospital and damage estimates ran into the millions of dollars.

The biggest casualty of the fire was the Electro Dynamics Works of the General Dynamics Corporation which employed more than 500 in the manufacture of motors for submarines and other naval vessels.

Nine of the buildings used by the firm were so badly damaged that company officials decided against rebuilding in Bayonne. They opted to relocate to Avenel, ending an association with Bayonne that dated back to 1904.

Employees of the two other firms located in the complex, Englander Mattress Co. and the Polytex Plastics Corporation, fared better.

Englander lost its warehouses in the fire and quickly lined up new supplies to keep its staff of 200 working. A New Brunswick plastics firm temporarily employed about half of the Polytex workers until the firm could get back unto its feet.

More than 500 firemen battled the fire for more than 19 hours as flames shot 300 feet into the air and a blanket of thick black smoke covered the city from bay to bay, from Bergen Point to the Jersey City-Bayonne line.

Three New York City fireboats poured tons of water on the flames and were credited by local officials with saving the Englander factory (and the Elco Marina and the boats moored there) from total destruction.

The fire was thought to have been started around 2 p.m. in a small storage shed behind the Polytex building near Newark Bay. It quickly engulfed the buildings, touching off a series of explosions.

Fanned by westerly winds coming off Newark Bay, the flames spread to the Electro Dynamics buildings and the Englander warehouse area and then three frame houses on Schuyler Court.

The winds’ gusts, as strong as 32 miles per hour, tossed burning cinders across Avenue A and started fires on lawns and roofs along North Street and Avenue A. They were quickly doused by homeowners manning garden hoses.

The main fire was fought by the firemen from Bayonne, the Bayonne Naval Supply Center, Jersey City, Elizabeth, Weehawken, Newark, North Bergen and West New York. Additional companies from Jersey City and Newark covered the city at firehouses on 57th, 34th and 26th streets until 1 p.m. the next day.

By 9 p.m. on the night of the fire, a crowd of about 1,500 gathered behind police lines at Ninth Street and Avenue A to watch the fire. Major traffic jams developed as hundreds of curiosity seekers flocked to the city after hearing about the disaster on radio and television.

The nuns from nearby Holy Family Academy were evacuated to the Star of the Sea Convent. Members of the school’s Fathers’ Club rolled up carpets and removed paintings and furniture from the school and convent.

One of the more dramatic moments of the fire was the rescue of seven firemen trapped by flames at the end of a pier where they were manning hoses drawing water from the bay. They were saved by Sea Scout Ship 7, skippered by Al Wiedow.

After the firemen declined his initial offer of help, Wiedow inched the craft close to the pier to enable the trapped men to pile into the boat just as a five-gallon drum of chemicals exploded.