The Grover Shoe Factory disaster was an industrial explosion, building collapse and fire that killed 58 people and injured 150 when it leveled the R. B. Grover shoe factory in Brockton, Massachusetts on March 20, 1905. Following a boiler explosion, the four-story wooden building collapsed and the ruins burst into flames, incinerating workers trapped in the wreckage.
The Grover disaster brought new attention to industrial safety and led to stringent safety laws and a national code governing the safe operation of steam boilers.
Read more about Grover Shoe Factory Disaster: The Factory, Explosion, Collapse and Fire, Financial Assistance, Failure Theories, Inquest, Bankruptcy, Legacy, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words shoe, factory and/or disaster:
“I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour ... was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)
“When wine is spilled with accident, death and disaster hasten.”
—Joseph O’Donnell. Clifford Sanforth. Ah Ling, Murder by Television, after he accidentally spills wine on Mrs. Houghland (1935)