"Fire at the International
Harvester Plant"
Connie Cook Smith
Transcript of
letter-to-editor, published in Canton Daily Ledger
on August 6, 1998, recalling the massive factory
fire that erupted exactly one year before, August 6,
1997.
Neighbor of IH plant
recalls fateful date of inferno
(Editor's note: It's the
first anniversary of the IH site fire. Following
are some personal memories from a local resident who
remembers that night very well.)
The view from our back deck
looks out through lovely old trees and between
houses onto South Main Street. Although invisible
to us, the western walls of the old International
Harvester plant are just three blocks away.
The night of the fire, I had
gotten up at 3 am. Middle-of-the-night is a good
time to get things done! But within a short time I
heard siren after urgent siren and many alarming
crashing sounds, as if a nearby building were being
ferociously attacked by a wrecking crew. Also,
coming down through the trees in the front yard, I
could see some really odd "rainfall."
Due to echoes, I thought all
the disastrous noise was somewhere in front of my
house, not behind it. There I stood, the picture of
chronic cluelessness, bewildered at how I could hear
such chaos from emergency vehicles and collapsing
structures, yet not be able to see a thing!
Was it a scene from the movie
Jurassic Park wherein the victim-to-be gazed
earnestly ahead in seemingly intelligent alertness?
And then something inside says, "Look behind you..."
Well, for some reason I did
turn from the front door and went out on the back
deck. There was just that annoying orange
streetlight in the alley...wait a minute, what is
that HUGE orange glow to the left?
My gaze jerked upward, and
finally -- duh! -- I saw the towering
tyrannosaurus: 200-foot flames were roaring above
the trees, and they sure didn't look like they were
as far as three blocks away.
"Oh, Expletive Deleted!" I
shouted, and ran to get my husband dressed. He was
still deep in rehabilitation from brain surgery a
few months earlier and needed assistance with
things. Then I decided getting him properly dressed
was absolutely optional -- let's just get out of
here!
After pretty much running
around in circles for a minute, it began to dawn on
me that the blaze was farther away than it looked.
And that because we were blessed with a calm night,
the wall of fire was going more or less straight up,
while the enormous smoke plume drifted gently to the
west, affecting our house with just the
ash-and-debris fall that I had thought was "odd
rain."
By this time, Mark was
dressed -- let's hear it for Graham Hospital Rehab,
and his own adrenaline. We knew now it was the old
factory that was on fire, and we sure hoped the
efforts to remove all the tires stored there awhile
back had been successful. If not, we certainly
would have to evacuate after all. With that kind of
toxicity, maybe for a very long time.
But then we decided to do
what every other alert citizen was doing -- let's
drive over there! Never mind our pangs of
conscience that this would not help the
fire-fighting effort at all. Even with Mark's
impaired ability to get to the car, we just seemed
biologically incapable of staying out of the way.
Like kids who make their
parents wonder why they ever had kids, off we went
to do what we shouldn't be doing -- driving around
too close to the scene and parking in all the wrong
places and gawking at the inferno. And boy, were we
not alone!
With apologies, I think of
the police professionals who were only a little
exasperated with everybody, never mean nor
authoritarian -- just truly helpful to the huge
effort at hand.
And of course, enough can
never be said for the firefighters, from Canton and
all over the area, who risked their lives -- and, as
everyone knows by now, fought with such fantastic
expertise that the historic church across the street
-- directly in the path of the northwest traveling
fireball -- suffered only heat damage, not flames.
At one point, Mark and I sat
in silence behind the blazing factory, among a great
many others also staring in silence, all rather
awestruck at the pure power of fire. Silhouetted
against the still-dark sky, we watched and listened
as the voracious flames consumed huge chunks of the
complex, as walls of brick crumbled and crashed and
structures of steel torturously twisted beyond all
recognition. Many folks must have been thinking of
images of bombed-out cities in WWII.
At least this event
was not that huge, nor so malevolent. But the
factory was once the throbbing heart of Canton's
economy. And though it essentially died years ago,
the body had not yet been buried. It still sat
among us like great ghost, a silent city in the
middle of town, awaiting its fate. And now at last
it seemed to be going to "meet its maker" -- but
through what looked like the flames of hell first.
As
dawn began to lighten the sky, Mark and I joined
"the party in the parking lot" at Aldi's, just east
of the factory entrance. There the fire came so
close we could feel the heat on our faces. And
soon, a police officer had to play parent to all of
us and move us back for our own safety.
Towards sundown that day, as Mark talked with a
neighbor on the porch swing, I felt drawn back to
the fire, still burning but under control. This
time with camera in hand, I joined others along
Fourth Avenue, which runs immediately east of the
complex.
As I
focused the lens on the still-standing elevator
tower, eerily contrasted against the smoke-filled
sunset, I remembered asking my dad what it had been
like to work at International Harvester. He was a
welder there before I was born.
I
think I expected him to say the place was a grimy
and horrible old sweatshop for slave labor -- but he
didn't see it that way at all. It seems that he and
almost everyone regarded the place with great
respect. And of course, everybody was connected to
the "shop whistle." In Canton, there was never any
excuse to not know what time it was.
As
we approach the Millennium, perhaps it is
appropriate for the factory to be gone, first in
function, now in form. It represented the
Industrial Age, which has been essential to
progress. But it's beginning to look like the
factories of the future are more like laboratories,
and the workers are technicians -- nano-technologists
building things from atoms on up, and cyber-masters
transmitting data that perhaps will not so much run
our lives as it all will enrich our living.
Maybe it's possible now that a phoenix will rise
from these ashes. Perhaps Canton is in position to
establish and to lead in some new kind of production
throughout the 21st century, just as we did so
gloriously, during the haydays of the 20th!
