The Guleke residence at 509 Pierce St. in Amarillo caught fire Oct. 27, 1908, and word spread quicker than the fire itself. The two-story house belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Edward Guleke, a pioneer Texas Panhandle ranching family. The blaze drew a larger crowd than the Saturday night card tournaments at the Elks Lodge. It seemed nearly everyone in Amarillo turned out to witness the spectacle.

Note the horse-drawn hose and ladder wagon arriving in the foreground.

As firefighters tried to get the fires under control, another ship, the High Flyer, exploded. The blasts were felt in Galveston. Houses were knocked off their foundations. About 600 people died.

Such tragedies can define a community. The response of the community becomes a part of its character, as well as its history. The stories you hear about the Texas City Disaster are of people helping their neighbors. You hear stories of people enduring loss courageously and bearing up under unimaginable hardship.

When the fires were put out, most people stayed. They rebuilt their homes and town. The annual observance honors that legacy. The stories are being passed from one generation to the next. It’s a legacy worth preserving. We hope you’ll set aside a moment today to remember those who were lost on that terrible day and pay tribute to those who had the resolve to rebuild.

The FBI launched an assault of tear-gas to end the standoff with the armed religious cult.
The compound was burned to the ground by the end of the day.

Four ATF agents were killed in the standoff, along with 80 Branch Davidians, which includes their leader, David Koresh. Twenty-two children were also killed.

“It makes me feel good that through such tragedy that we were able to have so many good things that would have never been able to happen before,” Rowe said.

Still, Tuesday was a tough day for her.

“This morning I was in a pretty happy place, but when I got here it brings back a lot of memories from that day — seeing all the old faces of the people who have been involved over the last few years,” she said.

Dr. David Herndon, of the University of Texas Medical Branch’s Truman Blocker Burn Unit, noted the bittersweet day as well. While acknowledging the tragic day five years ago when his center treated about two dozen victims, the $12.5 million donated as part of its settlement with Rowe has expanded the treatment of burn victims not just locally, but globally.

He said because of the contribution, 30 students were able to train at the burn unit and were part of an effort to develop a drug that helps burn victims regrow skin faster. Soon, money from the contribution will go to build a new burn center at the medical branch.

Monica O’Neal, the director of College of the Mainland’s Foundation, said the $5 million given to the community college in Texas City helped start the Gulf Coast Safety Institute, the first-of-its kind occupational safety and health technology training center.
The center provides safety training not just for future petrochemical workers but also all business segments, O’Neal said.

There were letters too from three Hornbeck, La., high school students who received scholarships from a foundation established by Rowe for students in her hometown.

“This scholarship has made a huge difference in my life, allowing me to pursue the degree I have always wanted,” Kelsey Snell, who is training to be a physical therapist, wrote. “This degree will allow me to fulfill my lifelong dream of helping others.”

For Rowe, who is expecting her own daughter in June, none of it made up for her parents’ deaths, but she said she was proud nonetheless. She also wants to make sure the event is not forgotten.

She is working with her attorney, Brent Coon, to create a memorial in honor of the 15 people killed in the blasts with a bronze plaque bearing a poem titled “15 Precious Butterflies” written by Texas City resident Jill Eisnaugle.

Good From Disaster
University of Texas Medical Branch Blocker Burn Unit: $12.5 million*
College of the Mainland: $5 million*
Texas A&M Mary Kay O-Connor Process Safety Center: $12.5 million*
Hornbeck High School scholarships: $1 million
St. Jude’s Hospital: $1 million
* Plus an additional $4 million matching donation program

The day was March 18, 1937.

“It was a beautiful spring day — beautiful,” said Mary Lou Taylor of Jacksonville, who attended the New London School. “Then all hell broke loose.”

The time period was fairly desperate as it was during the Great Depression, but an oil find in 1930’s Rusk County had prosperous effects on the small town of New London.

In 1932 a school was built for approximately $1 million dollars. They were the London Wildcats, not referring to an animal, but a play on the word “wildcatter” in reference to someone working in the oil-field or an oil prospector.

According to www.newlondonschool.org, students were preparing for an inter-scholastic meet in Henderson the next day while the PTA met in the gym.

At about 3 p.m. the manual training teacher, Lemmie R. Butler, turned on a sanding machine — little did he know it was the machine that would ignite a mixture of gas and air. The flame from the ignition filled a nearly closed space 253 feet by 56 feet, beneath the building.

“Immediately the building seemed to lift in the air and then smashed to the ground,” according to the site. “Walls collapsed. The roof fell in and buried its victims in a mass of brick, steel, and concrete debris. The explosion was heard four miles away, and it hurled a two-ton concrete slab 200 feet away, where it crushed a 1936 Chevrolet.”

Mary Lou Taylor was there and she survived.

“I was there in the building when the school blew up, but I was not hurt,” Taylor said. “I was on the second story and jumped out of a window to the closest thing to safety.”

Taylor said she was 12 years old at the time. She said because a lot of the school’s students were not in the building because of interscholastic league, a lot of them were saved.

“I had quite a few friends my age that were lost — I lost my homeroom teacher and several other teachers that were close to me,” she said.

“The building was a complete loss,” said Taylor.

“I remember very clearly there was a lot of broken concrete and very little part of the building was still standing,” Taylor said. “The part of the building I was in was still standing except the roof fell in on us and fell on the desks.

“We were not completely covered. Everyone was found fairly quick. After I jumped from the second story window, I had found my parents probably within a couple of hours. After the explosion, we went to school in portable buildings until they rebuilt the school.”

Hundreds were wounded that day, and www.newlondonschool.org counts the death toll at 293 students, guests and teachers.

“To commemorate the explosion we started having reunions in 1977,” Taylor said. “Now we gather as the ex-students association. Even though numbers have dwindled, the association still goes on strong.

“We have a reunion every other year, the odd year, because it was an odd year that the explosion occurred.”

This sad day in history took it’s toll on many lives and families. Still to this day we honor and preserve the memory of those lost.

Mary Lou Taylor was fortunate she survived. She has spoken to many an audience about the events of that fateful day, recounting the minutes that must have felt like hours.

But that fateful day did contribute to safety measures that, to this day, protect from similar disasters.

“In 1937 and all of the years before, there was no odor to natural gas,” Taylor said. “That’s when they started putting ‘odorizer’ in gas.”

Taylor is very grateful for what she has been given in life.

“Very definitely I appreciate everything I have because I have seen how fast terrible things can happen,” she said. “I was one of the lucky ones. I can’t answer how I got over it, except those of us who survived were very appreciative of what we have and the opportunities that the school gave us.”

The music, the bells, the helmets all represent firefighters who’ve died in the line of duty. They are the sights and sounds of the annual Firefighters’ Memorial ceremony and almost every year, tragically, there is a new death to mourn, and more family members grieving the loss of a loved one.

“It’s a family and that’s what’s so important, that they come and show up to remember our fallen,” said Cindy Burke, widow of Captain Grady Burke.

They come to honor firefighters like Burke. He was killed five years ago when the roof of a building collapsed.

“He loved his fellow firefighters,” said Cindy. “He would do anything he could to help them in their personal life as well as their work lives. He was an awesome man. He was a family man. His children are growing up and they’re wonderful young ladies and a young gentleman and I wish he could see that.”

Burke was just 40 years old and his wife says days like Saturday remind his kids their dad was a hero.

“It’s a very honorable death, yes,” she said.

Damian Hobbs had been on the job just one month after achieving his lifelong dream of becoming a firefighter.

“That’s what he wanted to do and he wouldn’t have done it any other way,” said Janice Deshazer, Hobbs’ sister.

Hobbs served two tours of duty in Iraq, but last April on Easter Sunday, both he and Captain James Harlow were killed in a house fire. It was Hobbs’ first and only fire. He was 30 years old.

“He was a young man of character who enjoyed serving his country and his community and he gave his life doing what he loved,” said Deshazer. “He gave it his all because it was all of him, and he would have done it again.”

According to the memorial’s website, 63 Houston firefighters have died in the line of duty since its it became a paid department in 1895.

The structure, once home to the defunct Waco Female College, was ablaze, and everyone in the premises at 8:30 p.m. March 22, 1910, had only minutes to escape. Luckily, everyone managed to escape.

“We ran, and I don’t know to this day whether I slid down the banister or ran down, but I got down,” Cooper told the interviewer in 1977.

She and a sister had been training to become “singing evangelists” while attending the school, which had relocated to Waco in 1895 from Thorp Spring, Texas, as AddRan Christian College.

The Webb sisters said the building was too far gone by the time Waco firefighters came to assist.

“The fire could be seen for 50 miles, people said,” recalled Cooper, who graduated from TCU in 1911 with bachelor of arts and oratory degrees. She later taught school at West Junior High for many years and cheered up sick soldiers serving at Camp MacArthur in Waco from 1917-19.

Another eyewitness and survivor of the fire, then-18-year-old Amboline Tyson Mahaffey — sister of Waco High football coaching legend Paul Tyson — said in her 1977 oral memoirs that as students flowed out the building, some tried to salvage their belongings along the way.

“But what we didn’t take, somebody got in and stole. That was awful!” she said.
Read entire article here.

Dellert ran into the apartment to rescue Butz. He took him to a window where firefighter Rip Esselstyn was standing on a ladder hosing down the flames, which were rolling from floor to ceiling. Dellert and Esselstyn helped Butz jump out the second-story window to safety.

“We thought it was going to be a small barbecue fire,” Esselstyn said. “All of a sudden, the flames exploded. It was like getting a sneak peek into hell.”

Jan. 5 marked the 10-year anniversary of the blaze at 2213 S. Lakeshore Blvd. that killed one resident and nearly killed Butz, who is now a battalion chief.

“It was extreme heat that kept me laying there,” Butz said. “I kept thinking I was done, but then I thought, ‘If you just lay here, you will be done.’ When Ax came in, I thought, ‘I am saved.’”

The Austin Fire Department has not had a firefighter die in the line of duty since 1972, officials said. Houston had two line-of-duty deaths in April 2009, Dallas had one death in 2005, and San Antonio had one in 1997. Ninety firefighters died in the line of duty nationwide in 2009, according to a U.S. Fire Administration report.

The 2000 fire is the closest the Austin Fire Department has come to losing a life since 1972. Butz lost his thumb and suffered a heart attack during the fire. Burns covered 53 percent of his body. Dellert, who was the only firefighter to enter the burning building to rescue Butz, suffered numerous burns, including on the left side of his face.

“This guy’s a hero,” Butz said Friday, patting Dellert on the back at Fire Station 35 as the three recounted the story of the rescue. “He won’t tell you that, but he came into that burning room … and thought, ‘We gotta get out of here.’”

The three men said their lives have changed completely since that fire, from the way they perform their jobs to how they live.

“I’ve been on edge since then,” said Esselstyn, who published a best-selling book, “The Engine 2 Diet,” last year. “I have a heightened sense of nervousness.”

In the past 10 years, the Fire Department has taken measures to ensure the safety of the people on duty, creating new policies such as the “two in, two out” rule, which requires that two people remain outside a building in case two others are unable to escape a fire inside.

“There have been more initiatives since the fire,” Dellert said. “Our guys’ training has intensified, and we’re using newer methods like coordinated attack to help the guys stay safe.”

Although Butz returned to the fire department as safety chief after the fire, he still has heart problems and is on medical leave until at least the end of this month.

Butz serves as a spokesman for the Blood and Tissue Center of Central Texas as a way to give back to the place that gave him enough blood to save his life, he said.

“With that fire came personal tragedy and destruction,” Esselstyn said. “But I can’t help but think how great it is that John is alive. The inner strength of this guy is mind-boggling.”

From Fox 7 News

“As with any great civil servant, he was doing what he was trained to do while loving every minute of it,” said Fulce’s youngest son Aaron Fulce in a 2006 interview.

The fire started about 4 p.m. Dec. 23, 1989, in the Salvation Army Thrift Store. Fire Chief Gordan Weger, who was assistant chief at the time of the fire and one of the first firefighters on the scene, said: “When I arrived, I went in and they were still doing business downstairs. There wasn’t any smoke, but they told me there was smoke upstairs.”

When he went to the second floor, however, he saw smoke and flames near the building heater. He radioed for response units.

“By the time we … got the lines stretched back up and got up there, then the fire had grown … to where we weren’t able to control it,” he said.

Weger and another firefighter made an interior attack on the fire as Fulce and two others worked to ventilate the roof — standard procedure, Weger said. It was during that time that the roof collapsed and Fulce disappeared into the building.

Crews moved outside to fight the blaze as it continued to grow, eventually consuming two neighboring businesses, Denison Optical Co. and Beall’s Department Store, and damaging several others.

“It’s a condition of shock,” Weger said. “You’ve got a fellow firefighter you’ve work with and you don’t know his fate.”

He described the mood of firefighters as “somber” as they worked through the night and into Christmas Eve, battling the blaze while temperatures dropped to seven degrees.

“We did our job,” he said. “Everybody operated efficiently, just the way we should … even with that over our heads.”

The fire was described as the worst downtown blaze in modern history in The Denison Herald and the first fire to claim a firefighter in Denison since a turn-of-the-century church blaze.

“We are almost just like family, and that was tough on everybody,” Bill Taylor, the fire chief at the time, said in 2005, looking back on the incident.

While it has been 20 years since that cold night, Fulce’s sacrifice has not been forgotten. Immortalized in marble at Heritage park in Denison, the “marker is dedicated to his bravery and sacrifice in his service to our community.” Those words are on the inscription. The park, which fills the vacant lot left by the fire at the corner of Barnett and Main streets, was unofficially known as gazebo park, for the gazebo that was donated in Fulce’s honor, but renamed Heritage Park in May 2004.

At the time, an evergreen tree, which still stands today, was planted in Fulce’s honor. The marker was added later that year.

“What else could I do but stand there and smile and cry. I stand in awe of the beautiful black marble monument erected in Heritage Park in honor of my father, T.O. Fulce, and the ultimate sacrifice he made Christmas Eve 1989 in the downtown Denison fire,” said Fulce’s daughter Talina Fulce-Carver in a 2005 letter to the editor. “What a great city to be a part of.”

The pavement was far below, but the roof of an adjacent building was closer — if the young woman could just leap that far. Heat and more smoke rolled into her room. Billie Miller jumped.

On the other side of the building, police officers A.E. Miller and I.N. Austin scrambled up fire escape ladders. They were on routine night patrol when they spotted the flames coming from the roof of the Antlers. By the time they called in the alarm, people were on the ladders that zig-zagged down the walls of the building, calling for help. The officers rushed into action

Like Billie Miller, R.D. Rankin of Sterling, Okla., awoke to screams and sensed immediately what was happening. He took time only to pull on his trousers before throwing open the window. For him there was no adjacent roof. Neither was there any other option. He took a deep breath and jumped to the pavement — three stories below.

A young woman worked frantically to get her three young children out of the burning hotel where the little family was living. When they were safe, she ran back into the flames to rescue her sister and 9-month-old niece.

When the alarm sounded, Red, the big mixed-breed dog who served as Mascot for Fire Station No. 2 on Buchanan Street, was cozied up with her new litter of pups. But if James Childers — the human assigned to her — was going on a call, he wasn’t going without her. Seconds later, Red was braced against the cold wind in the open cab of the engine, speeding toward the orange glow that rose in the east.

The crowds gathered at Indiana and Eleventh Streets. They saw the dim figure of a man appear in the smoke of a third-floor window. He screamed just as the floor below him collapsed into a glowing cauldron.

The register was inside, in the blaze. The terrified manager told firefighters he thought 30, maybe 40 people were in the Antlers that night. By 4 a.m., most had been accounted for. Then the west wall collapsed.

A.O. Johnson and W.J. Geis, assigned to Fire Station No. 5, were manning a hose on the roof when the wall began to go. They scurried to a fire escape — but the bottom was gone. Geis rappelled down the fire hose. Johnson made a split-second decision as the ground rushed toward him. He let go of the escape rail.

Roy Anderson and Smiley Turner were among the best at their jobs. Turner was assistant chief, a tough World War I firefighting Marine. Anderson had worked fires for a dozen years. The two climbed the fire escape on the southwest wall to fight the blaze on the second floor. Roy Anderson’s younger brother, Gano, stayed on the ground with James Childers to feed the hose up to them. Roy started to scramble down as soon as the bricks began to fall. Then the avalanche came.
Read entire story here.
See photos related to story here.