Across town amid brief torrents of rain, flames lashed the sky and leapt out of the wreckage of the Mobile and Ohio railroad yard. Shifting winds scattered fires from overturned stoves, furnaces, and fireplaces, sending fiery tongues of heat throughout the wrecked city. Within half an hour, flames stretched from Walnut Street up through the levee and across a mile and a half of streets in an unbroken firewall.
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Anything that was not fully destroyed by the wind in the business district came under threat of burning. For those that survived the tornado, they now had to survive being burned alive and the flames made quick work of flammable debris surrounding them. In a dark twist of the storm’s winds, people whose entire homes or businesses were swept cleanly from their foundations now found themselves in relative safety from fire than those whose properties collapsed under the force of debris or wind on top of them.
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Attempting to get ahead of the fire proved challenging as water pressure failed at fire hydrants across town. The new power house, which supplied electricity to the water pumps, had collapsed in, releasing steam into the air. Injured, afraid, and unaware of their own family’s plight, power house workmen valiantly restored water service within two hours by manually pumping water into the underground mains directly from the river.
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Over the next several hours the combined efforts of fire companies from Cairo, Murphysboro, Carbondale, Anna, Zeigler, Benton, and Herrin, Illinois crawled through the mangled streets in an unrivaled effort to extinguish the fires armed with a seemingly endless supply of water from the river.
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Teams of men rushed to strategic areas like 16th and Walnut Streets to search for survivors before the fire could come. A woman, crushed but alive under the weight of her home at 21st and Hortense Streets, had her legs amputated by an overwhelmed doctor. It was the only way to free her before the flames came. Fire companies armed whatever capable men they could find with dynamite to blow up entire city blocks in hopes of eliminating or reducing the fire’s spread.
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The ghastly reality, though, was evident as the risk of dynamiting potential survivors, or the bodies of their neighbors, chilled everyone placing the explosives ahead of the fires. It seemed to work until the fire blew across an alley near Tippey’s restaurant and began spreading again. Despite exploding hundreds of pounds of dynamite, there was simply too much fuel scattered around. The dynamite merely shuffled wreckage from one pile into another, smaller pile. The fire carried on.