ABSTRACT
In the late afternoon of Saturday 11 March 1911, 275 young women, many of them teenage girls, were looking forward to finishing their day's hard work at the Triangle Shirtwaist dressmaking factory, a nine-storey building on New York's East Side. The fire started in one of the lower floors, trapping the women above. There were buckets of water but no effective fire fighting equipment that could cope with such a rapidly spreading blaze. However, some lessons seem to have been learnt. Many other states soon decided to follow the example of New York and enact new safety regulations. The Imperial Foods chicken factory at Hamlet was just that a factory processing poultry. The fire exits had been padlocked to prevent theft of the products and to stop workers taking unauthorised breaks. In February 1956 eight female workers perished, trapped behind a locked door on the top floor of a blazing Victorian woollen mill in Keighley, West Yorkshire.
