The Surfside Disaster is Our Generation's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Moment

On Shabbat afternoon, March 25, 1911, the top floors of the Jewish-owned Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Lower Manhattan went up in flames.

Due to the building’s structural flaws, the number of people working at the time, and the lack of responsive emergency personnel, 146 lives were lost in just 18 minutes.

As labor attorney Jonathan D. Karmel explains at-length in the book “Dying to Work,” the event was a crucial catalyst for modern safety regulations. Though this was not the first factory fire and surely would not be the last, the number of lives — as well as the horrifying images of people jumping to their deaths — were enough to force a significant response.

110 years later, I wonder whether — and how — the Jewish community of today will come to terms with our own Triangle Shirtwaist moment.

After three horrible and preventable tragedies this year: the trampling of pilgrims in Meron, a bleacher collapse in an Israeli synagogue, and the collapse of a majority-Jewish Surfside residence — all related to design, building and occupancy standards, and accessibility regulations — we are reliving the Factory Fire in slow motion. And yet, our responses seem completely disconnected from reality.

There has been no widespread call for an overhaul of our regulatory practices, no marching in the streets demanding answers for the families of those we lost. Even in a spiritual sense, we can easily connect these instances to religious and spiritual regulations and laws. And yet, this is not the dominant discourse surrounding these events. We’ve simply thrown up our hands and bowed our heads.

If we are to truly honor the victims of the Surfside disaster, we must come to terms with the entirely preventable mistakes and missteps that led to their untimely deaths.

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Sadly, the Triangle Fire provides some historic insight.

Sprinkler systems, firewalls and fire stair systems, all lacking from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, were already in place in many cotton mills by the late 19th century. The garment district was aware of these practices, yet owners broadly did not implement them, because the expected financial losses due to a potential fire did not seem to outweigh the costs of implementing safety procedures.

Governmental agencies largely allowed this, preferring to let business owners determine the financial decisions they were willing to make.

In fact, it was only because a mass movement of New Yorkers hit the streets days after the Triangle Fire tragedy — and because a district attorney indicted the owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, for manslaughter — that the story propelled a public safety and regulatory conversation. Without this populist outrage, it’s likely we simply would have mourned and moved on.

The initial indictment also led to countless civil suits, and the entire garment industry felt the real potential loss of ignoring best-practices. Just 10 years later, almost every state in the country had workers’ compensation laws in place.

Employers — and not laborers — were the most powerful group to promote these laws. They saw the Shirtwaist Kings lose everything to mountains of civil proceedings, and knew what their fates would be if there were no clear regulations in place.

And that’s what we, in the Jewish world, are missing right now. We lack a mass movement. We aren’t holding owners accountable or seeking support from those in development and design.