American Red Cross Relief Work at the Scene The tragedy is less than an hour old when John J. O'Connor, Director of the Central Division of the American Red Cross, is at work at the scene of the accident. Within a few hours, Ernest P. Bicknell, National Director of the American Red Cross, is speeding on his way from national headquarters in Washington, D. C. to Chicago.
Officials of Reid, Murdoch & Company, a wholesale grocery firm, approve the use of their building for the rescue and relief efforts. The building, located directly across the Chicago River from the scene of the accident, is untenanted this day (employees are attending their annual company picnic).
The basement and 1st floor of the Reid, Murdoch & Company building are opened for the rescue and relief efforts. Operators are quickly secured to staff the telephone switchboard. Offices are appropriated for the work of the police department, the state's attorney, the coroner's jury, and the nurses and physicians.
Those who are clinging to life are taken to the first floor for treatment. The deceased are numbered and brought into the large, cement basement where volunteer embalmers are already at work. Police carefully search the victims' bodies for valuables and identifications, placing all papers and other articles in large envelopes on which are written the police numbers.
A requisition desk is set up within the first hour. All orders for supplies needed for the rescue and relief work are sent to this desk.
Truck loads of stretchers, blankets and other supplies begin arriving from the State Street department stores. These merchants offer their supplies, equipment and personnel at no charge.
The alley at the rear of the building congests with the scores of trucks and delivery wagons. As each truck is emptied of its goods, it is loaded with blanket-wrapped bodies and sent to the Second Regiment Armory (which had been secured by the Coroner's office as its central morgue).
Shortly after the Coroner's office had established the temporary morgue at the Armory, the American Red Cross establishes rest rooms and first aid stations within and sees to the installation of scores of telephones. The chairperson of the Red Cross nurses in Chicago, Miss Minnie F. Aherns, quickly selects a competent staff and provides cots and restoratives for the Armory emergency stations. The emergency stations handle dozens of fainting and hysterical people who enter the temporary morgue. Between midnight and 7 a.m., care is provided for thirty hysterical and exhausted women.
About midday, nurses and physicians are secured to relieve those who were tiring. By afternoon the strain was beginning to tell on the rescuers, many of whom had been without food since early morning. Miss Harriet Vittum, head of the Northwestern University Settlement, is enlisted by the American Red Cross. Miss Vittum establishes feeding stations on nearby tugs and on the docks.
Miss Mabel T. Boardman, Chairperson of the National Relief Board of the American Red Cross, telegraphs Illinois Govenor Edward F. Dunne: "The American Red Cross expresses deepest sympathy in overwhelming disaster to so many of the people of Chicago. Mr. Ernest P. Bicknell, National Director, leaves immediately for Chicago to be of all assistance possible. Mr. J. J. O'Connor, Director, Central Division, has placed Red Cross and local chapter at disposition of Chicago for relief work."
Source: Final Report, Eastland Disaster Relief Committee, Chicago Chapter, American Red Cross, 1918.
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