At seven-thirty that evening, Morro Castle ran aground on the sandy beach of Asbury Park, New Jersey.
The following morning, crowds swarmed around the still-smoldering wreck, which reeked of burning wood and death. Coast Guard officials who boarded the wreck saw that the fire had spared nothing, burning Morro Castle right down to the steel decking and bulkheads. Furniture, paneling, and electrical wires were reduced to heaps of ash. On the fantail, along with discarded clothing and shoes, they also found the charred body of a small boy.3
One reporter got aboard the vessel with a movie camera. As heat from the decks blistered the soles of his feet, he captured the horrific scene: “Gaping portholes with the glass melted by heat, a charred hulk… girders and beams everywhere twisted by the terrific heat of the all devouring fire, every bit of planking was burned off the decks amidships, and the blasting flames had even buckled the rails, twisting everything that did not melt in the blistering heat.”4
He then pointed his camera to a row of scorched lifeboats still in their davits. The fire had spread so quickly that most of them could not be launched.
The cause of the Morro Castle fire has never been conclusively determined, but a sequence of events came out in the inquiries. Several hours before the fire started, Captain Roger Wilmott was found dead in his cabin after complaining of stomach cramps. First Officer William F. Warms took over as acting captain for the rest of the trip from Havana to New York. At 3 A.M., a steward smelled smoke coming from the first-class writing room. He opened a storage locker full of linen, wood varnish, and cleaning chemicals. Blue flames burst from the locker, spread across the ceiling, and engulfed the entire room in seconds.5
Some pointed to negligent maintenance. Others suspected radio operator George Rogers set the fire deliberately to cover up his murder of the captain. Many crew members whispered that he was a psychopath with a criminal past. As panic swept through the ship, Rogers remained at his post as the flames engulfed the radio cabin, and he later enjoyed promoting himself as one of the heroes of the disaster. But twenty years later after the fire, Rogers was convicted of two unrelated murders. He died in prison.
When Theodore Ferris designed Morro Castle, he had built fire doors that would close automatically when a space reached a certain temperature, to seal off the burning area. But Ward Line management had ordered the tripwires disabled, probably to prevent the doors from closing accidentally. Even if the doors had been closed, there was still a six-inch gap between the combustible ceiling and the steel decking. Traveling through the gap, the flames bypassed the doors and set adjacent compartments ablaze.6
In keeping with regulations, Ferris had also put heat sensors in the cargo holds and cabins but not the public rooms. Acting captain William Warms saw no indicator lights flash on the bridge’s fire detection panel when the flames burst out of the writing room’s storage locker. By the time Warms found out about the fire, it was burning out of control, having spread to the two-deck-high lounge and engulfing the ship’s main staircase and elevators.
Moreover, above the lounge sat the ship’s Lyle gun, a device designed to fire a line and rescue bucket to another ship for an evacuation. Inexplicably, stored next to the Lyle gun was more than a hundred pounds of gunpowder. Its explosion had sent flames blasting high into the night sky, blowing out the entire center section of the ship. Wind blew through broken windows and portholes, whipping the flames into greater fury.
It was the exploding gunpowder, not the muffled fire alarms, that roused most of the ship’s 318 passengers, many of whom had been drinking heavily to celebrate their last night at sea. The flames found more and more fueclass="underline" wood paneling, cotton sheets and linens, damask drapes. Fire zigzagged through the ventilation shafts that “sea cooled” every single stateroom. The power then failed, plunging the ship’s smoke-filled corridors into darkness. Some panicking crew members made a run for the lifeboats not yet consumed by the inferno, leaving passengers stranded on the blazing vessel. The remaining crew tried valiantly to turn on the hydrants and spray water on the advancing flames. Following the standards of the time, Ferris estimated that only six of the ship’s forty-two hydrants would ever be used at one time. When all were used at once, the trickling hoses had virtually no pressure in them and were useless.7
Two days after the burnt-out hulk beached itself, the New York Times reported that 183 passengers and crew were either dead or missing. Four hundred ninety-one survived. The death toll was later revised to 124, less than a tenth of Titanic’s. But the fire on the ship was front-page copy for weeks. On September 18, U.S. Steamboat Inspection chief Dickerson N. Hoover noted that “not a single fire door [was] closed on the ship,” and that there was no evidence remaining to determine whether or not acting captain Warms had shut down the ship’s ventilation system.8
Questions were also raised in the design community about the use of ornate, period furnishings aboard ships. Marine Engineering, the nation’s premier naval architectural publication, showed a picture of the ship’s beautiful wood-paneled main lounge. Although such a space was an “excellent example of the modern ship decorator’s art,” wrote the article, they were the kind of decorative schemes that “presented a fire hazard that must be eliminated” in new American ships.9 Wood furniture and plush draperies, even if they created a luxurious ambience, were lethal if they ever caught fire aboard a passenger ship. The answer was to treat flammable fittings with fire-retardant chemicals and to eliminate wood from ship construction to the maximum extent possible.
The owners of the Morro Castle scrambled to defend themselves. “Nothing was overlooked by the Ward Line to prevent, as far as human foresight could, the happening of such a disaster,” said Franklin Mooney, president of the Ward Line’s parent company, Atlantic Gulf & West Indies Steamship Lines. “We note with great interest the suggestion made that future construction should be of steel largely in place of wood,” he suggested, “and this is already having our consideration.”10
Franklin Mooney was also sweating from a Senate inquiry investigating the business practices not just of his own company, but of the entire American merchant marine. He might have hoped that the conviction of acting captain Warms and two officers for criminal negligence would have satisfied the public’s cry for justice. Warms had refused to send out an SOS until it was too late, and had failed to order an evacuation until the fire had driven passengers away from the lifeboats and toward the stern. Worse still, the lifeboats that were launched were filled mostly with crew members. The hundreds of passengers marooned on board had two choices: stay on a burning ship or jump into the sea. Warms’s conviction was eventually overturned, and within a couple of years, he was back at sea.11
Six months after it washed ashore, tugs yanked what was left of Morro Castle from the beach and towed it to the ship breakers in Baltimore.12