Disaster Legislation and the Great Burn of 1910.

Students will be studying the impact of disaster legislation in a mini unit on cause and effect. Some of the topics students are cases of which students are already familiar.  However, I am adding a few new examples to help with the comparisons.  One of the disasters will be about the Great Burn of 1910--which affected a large part of Northwestern Montana and the Idaho panhandle.  It led to sweeping change in forest fire fighting practices, the organization of the forest service and forest management.

The Great Burn had many gripping stories of tragic deaths and survival under difficult conditions.  For example and entire crew of 28 firefighters were lost when they became trapped.  This has always been called the "lost crew."  One of the more exciting stories was Ed Pulaski, who led his crew to a small mine shaft where he forced them to stay, even at gunpoint, until the fire passed over them.  The conditions in the mine shaft were suffocating--but 35 out of the 40 men lived.

The disasters and legislation we'll refer to are the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Great Burn, the sinking of the Titanic, the Chicago Tylenol Murders, 9-11, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.