OTD in History: The Chicago Fire

The second-worst disaster in Chicago history, lol

October 8, 1871. Chicago is booming. 21 years before, its population was 30k—now it’s over 90k. When you have that many people, they need houses, and when you need that many houses, you build them fast, and when you need them that fast, you build them cheap, and when you need them cheap, you build them out of wood.

A lot of houses. Built fast. Out of wood. This place blew up so fast that actual viruses would have told it to slow down. (Grok gave me different population numbers so my count might be off, but the point is, Chicago was expanding.)

Around 9PM on the 8th, a fire broke out and it spread like…well…yeah. Not only did it eat up all these dry wooden housing units, it also consumed businesses and historical buildings. I remember reading a play about this in 7th grade and apparently the organized emergency services response was also bungled, in addition to not being prepared to handle something at this scale.

3 square miles of real estate burned over the next thirty hours, and the bulk of the people killed or displaced were poor. The fire didn’t die out until it started raining on the morning of October 10th.

They obviously rebuilt, and did so with better building codes, and they learned how to train their emergency services to respond to something like that. As if Chicago didn’t suffer enough, they now have an MLS team (lol) named The Chicago Fire, which is just…wow. That’s like having two teams in New York and one is named after airplanes and the other is named after tall buildings. Can you even aaaaaaah. Ah. Yeah. Whoops.

Oh, and what’s the bigger disaster nowadays?

Come on. You don’t really need to ask me that.

Anyway. 154 years ago today.