Young Writers Society

My latest project involves a few chapters running through the events of a major fire that engulfs a mansion and a few smaller surrounding structures. Does anybody know of any major historical fires, or even well documented smaller fires, that I could look into for a play-by-play sequence of events?

Thanks!

The most major United States Historical fire that I can think of is the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 - which changed a lot of how Chicago developed and fire safety stuff and is just interesting to read about in general.

And then for a current fire in 2015 the small town of Platte, SD had a horribly tragic fire of basically a mansion, there's lots of articles about it that you can check out, although not great pictures: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/s ... -1.2422710
https://dakotafreepress.com/2015/11/03/ ... shot-self/

This site might have some good stuff about historical fires: http://www.strikefirstusa.com/2016/07/t ... ved-world/

@alliyah

Human fault seems to be the main issue in these, which could lead to some interesting plot. It also looks like the worst of the damage happens within the first ten or twenty minutes, so I'm probably going to be working with a much shorter time frame than I had expected.

Thank you! =] Those links were really useful.

Like what Alliyah said, I would definitely look into the Great Chicago Fire. In addition to that, there's the often overlooked 1871 Peshtigo fire.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/nyre ... -fire.html
This isn't necessarily historical or major, but it did happen to historic building.

https://www.thisoldhouse.com/ideas/what ... house-fire
This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it gives a play-by-play of a fictional house fire (admittedly, set in recent times) focused on the first five or so minutes. Somethings that I would personally note is that saving people on the second floor could be impossible after about five minutes.