I was saddened to hear today of the large fire in a Brazilian nightclub last night in which 233 people died. These tragic events occur every few decades; within my living memory there was the Beverly Hills Supper club fire (in Kentucky) in 1977 where 165 people lost their lives and the Station Fire (in Rhode Island) in 2003 resulting in the deaths of 100 people. However, the largest such fire occured many years ago a few blocks from where I did my General Surgery residency.
The Cocoanut Grove was a large nightclub located just south of the Boston Commons and Gardens. It was in 1942, November, nearly a year after the beginning of World War II. As in most of these fires, when investigators look into them they usually find two things, a crowd over the legal capacity of the building and code violations. It is estimated that the night of the fire, more than a thousand customers were packed into a building rated for 460 occupants. There were many flammable decorations throughout, and the fire consumed the building rapidly. The exact cause is not known, although a busboy may have struck a match that ignited an artificial palm tree as he tried to see in the dark to change a light bulb that he had dropped. As panicked customers sought to get out, most tried to escape the same way they came in, through the front entrance which was a single revolving door. They rushed both sides of the door, preventing it from rotating in either direction. Other exits were bolted shut and a large plate glass window was boarded up. Other doors that could have been used opened inward, which were jammed as people tried to rush out. The firefighters had the fire out in about an hour. Four hundred and ninety-two people died.
Many of the victims were taken to the Massachusetts General Hospital, not too far away. I did my residency there beginning in 1985, and there were still some older surgeons there who remembered the fire and its aftermath. There were new and experimental treatments that were tried. Up until then, the standard treatment for burns was tannic acid, which created a scab-like crust to serve as a barrier to infection. However, physicians at the MGH used petroleum jelly and gauze, which was much gentler to the damaged tissues. Sulfa was the only real antimicrobial treatment widely available at the time, but the medical teams were able to get hold of some penicillin as well. Blood banks and transfusions were in their infancy, but were utilized to help the surviviors.
The seventieth anniversary of the fire was last November 28th. In October, the Boston police department released the transcripts of the witness interviews, and below is a link to that site, where you can hear in their own words the survivors tell of that terrible night. Today, the site of the Cocoanut Grove is a parking garage, part of a hotel complex.
It is always difficult for us to take our human tragedies and understand where they belong in God's sovereign plan. Many believe that God is absent or uninvolved with these events. We struggle to see His hand in the events that cause so much suffering. I would not even begin to try and explain why God allows suffering. In fact, in my new book, Surviving the Suffering, I go to great lengths to not tackle that problem. Many people, much smarter than I, have tried to sort that out over thousands of years.
There is precedent for God using fire to destroy the wicked, as he did in Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19), but I do not believe that is true of these fires. We live in a fallen world, where imperfect people sometimes do things that lead to tragedies. There were many mistakes made in the Cocoanut Grove disaster, from overcrowding to flammable decorations to blocked exits. God knew of all of these, as He knew that the busboy would drop the lightbulb in the dark. I am not so cynical as to believe that the only purpose God had for that fire was to lead to better fire codes.
These tragedies have a Godly purpose that we will not understand in our lifetime. Joseph was sold into slavery, and falsely imprisoned, only to become the leader of Egypt years later. The famine that struck the region led to the Israelites moving to Egypt under Joseph's protection, where they would grow in number and "were fruitful and increased abundantly, multiplied, and grew exceedingly mighty" (Exodus 1:7). However, it took brutality on the part of a new Pharaoh and his taskmasters to make the Israelites desire to return to their land. "And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage" (Ex 1:14) led to "Then the children of Israel groaned because of the bondage, and they cried out" (Ex 1:23). These cruelties, slavery, imprisonment, famine, and brutality, were tragedies that led to the foundation of Israel in the Promised Land.
As individuals, we must try and examine our lives to see what God is doing with us and for us when we suffer. He has a plan for each and every one of us. We may not understand God or His ways, and to try to dissect out His sovereign will would be like the paramecium looking back up from the microscope to analyze the person on the eyepiece. What we do know, however, is the Word that He has given us, and those things He has told us are as immutable as the physical laws of the univese. We know that He works all things for good to those who love Him (Romans 8:28), and He hears us in our suffering. As for the Israelites in Egypt, "So God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God looked upon the children of Israel and God acknowledged them." We cannot know the Master Plan; we must be certain that we know that He hears us, loves us, and cares about us.
1. http://archive.org/search.php?query=cocoanut%20grove%20fire%20AND%20collection%3Aamericana
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