“Pulmonary complications following smoke inhalation account for about 77 percent of fire-related deaths,” says Sumita Khatri, a pulmonologist at Cleveland Clinic, “and it’s mostly from carbon monoxide poisoning. He attacked a problem that had stymied inventors for years: smoke inhalation. The incident put the inadequacy of fire codes and safety equipment on national display, and Morgan, who had himself once worked in Cleveland’s booming garment industry, decided to try his hand at an effective mask. A fire enveloped New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Company on March 25, 1911, killing 146 garment workers-most of them young female immigrants who were locked in the factory. Morgan’s invention was born out of tragedy. “They threw a bunch of gas masks in the car-remember, they were selling these things-and in their pajamas, drove down to the lakefront.” Safely through the smoke and fumes “He rustled his brother Frank,” says the inventor’s granddaughter, Sandra Morgan. Morgan-a local inventor who called himself “the Black Edison”-and the gas mask he had patented two years earlier. Some 11 hours later, desperate to save anyone still alive, the Cleveland Police turned to Garrett A. But they lacked proper safety equipment for the smoke and fumes 11 of the 18 rescuers died. Two rescue parties entered the tunnel searching for survivors. When the dust settled, 11 tunnel workers were dead. The blast left twisted conduit pipes littering the tunnel floor and tore up railroad tracks inside the corridor, with noxious smoke curling off the rubble. It happened during work on Cleveland’s newest waterworks tunnel, a 10-foot-wide underwater artery designed to pull in water from about five miles out, beyond the city’s polluted shoreline. Just before midnight at the close of a hot summer day in 1916, a natural gas pocket exploded 120 feet beneath the waves of Lake Erie.
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