1936 Fire
The 1936 season was Cress Hale’s 50th in Bristol Bay and it started off with all indications of a strong run of salmon. By July 7, midway through the season, Hale had packed 40,000 cases but after he made his daily afternoon rounds through the Pederson Point cannery and settled into his office to deal with paperwork, all hell broke loose.
A fire started in a rear storage building and whipped by strong winds quickly spread through the wooden structure. The complex of buildings lacked any fire breaks and even worse, the heat buckled pipes that supplied the cannery with water. As fire hoses ran dry the fire spread unchecked from one building to the next. No one was injured but the loss of the cannery and its salmon pack was total. The cause of the fire was never determined. The facility was insured but the insurance and legal issues involved were so complicated, the insurance industry wrote a book about it called The Bristol Bay Fire.
Hale returned to his home in Piedmont, California started drawing up plans to rebuild. His new design divided the canning lines into two separate buildings with a substantial fire break in between. In late February, 1937, Hale wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning about reports of Japanese plans to fish for Bristol Bay salmon. Within a few months, the issue erupted into a major diplomatic dispute between the U.S. and Japan but Hale did not live to see it.
On March 29, 1937, Hale died at age 65 of what was reported as thrombosis or blood clots. Mabel described his passing as, “A stanch ship sets sail for distant shores.” The book about the Bristol Bay fire was just coming off the press and his insurance brokers inserted a card that dedicated it to Hale.
Read more about this topic: Crescent Porter Hale
Famous quotes containing the word fire:
“You look like a fire sale.”
—John Guare (b. 1939)