NFPA Journal - May/June 2017 - 12

CHASED
BY FLAMES

AS THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE
COCOANUT GROVE FIRE NEARS, AN
ONGOING RESEARCH PROJECT SEEKS TO
UNCOVER HOW THE FIRE MOVED SO FAST
By Angelo Verzoni
n the weeks following the November 28, 1942,
Cocoanut Grove fire, which killed 492 people
who were inside the swank Boston nightclub at
the time, survivors described to investigators
the terror as flames seemed to chase after them.
"As we went up the stairs, the fire went all over the ceiling and was coming after us," Leroy S. Marks of Boston told
investigators, according to records released publicly by the
Boston Police Department in 2012. Similarly, Roland Sousa
of Salem said, "We made for the stairs, [and] the flames were
on my heels and crawled right along and spread out and
then started smoking."
The blaze began in the club's Melody Lounge, located in
the basement of the building, then raced up a set of stairs

12 | NFPA JOURNAL * M A Y / J U N E 2 0 1 7

and across the entire first floor-a distance of roughly 225
feet-in just five minutes. The question of what caused it to
move so fast has remained unanswered for nearly 75 years.
But a joint project currently being conducted by the Fire
Protection Research Foundation (FPRF) and Worcester
Polytechnic Institute (WPI) may be helping fire engineers and historians better understand some of the
more puzzling aspects of the fire's behavior.
The project provides students taking WPI's fire
modeling course with the opportunity to apply modern
fire modeling techniques to the decades-old fire. "Really
going through this fire with the students has given us a
better feel for how the fire
went from one end of the
BOSTON 2017
Conference & Expo
building to the other," said
Casey Grant, executive director
of the FPRF. "It was a very fast
CONFERENCE
SESSION
fire."
The project provides stuThe Unsolved
Mystery of
dents with two weeks to study
the Cocoanut
the Cocoanut Grove fire and
Grove Fire
Tuesday, June 6,
apply modern fire modeling
11 a.m.-noon
techniques like computational
Casey Grant, NFPA;
fluid dynamics to it, according
Nicholas Dembsey,
Worcester Polytechnic
to Nicholas Dembsey, who
Institute
teaches fire modeling at WPI
and whose students participate
in the project. "It's a great case to use with the students,"
Dembsey told NFPA Journal. "A lot of times, when you're
trying to do fire modeling, you're looking at fire investigation reports and there's a lot of missing info. With this case,
it's well-documented and it has certain unique features, and
that allows students to learn more about fire modeling."
Grant and Dembsey will speak about the fire and the
FPRF-WPI project during an education session at the Conference & Expo.
For the first two years of the project, in 2014 and 2015,
students were tasked with figuring out how big and how
hot the fire had to be to travel as far as it did, Dembsey
said. This year, students were asked to do the same but
also to come up with building changes that could have prevented the fire's spread, he said. (The project was not held
in 2016.) Despite the three years' worth of student research,
there is still no definitive answer to why the fire spread so
rapidly.
But finding one isn't necessarily the primary goal of the
project, Grant said. Instead, its main purpose is to serve as
a learning opportunity and selling point for students who
are considering a career in fire protection engineering.
Besides, finding an answer to that question might not even
be possible. "I don't know if we'll ever solve the mystery of
the Cocoanut Grove fire," Grant said. "But this project gives
students the opportunity to learn and apply techniques to
the fire that weren't available in 1942."

ADRIENNE ALBRECHT

Dispatches

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - May/June 2017