A few years ago, Ryan Schnurr developed a bit of an obsession with industrial fires. But it’s not like he just made a spreadsheet where he listed all their stats. He was interested in the fires themselves, sure – how they started, how they affected the places where they happened, in both the short and the long term – but he also wanted to understand the stories we tell about them. Take the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911 in Manhattan. It was a horrible tragedy. 146 garment workers, mostly women and girls, died. It also helped lay the groundwork for revolutionary legal protections for workers. Ryan wanted to understand other fires too. So he created a podcast. (For those of you who are interested, it was also his dissertation!) It’s called Fire!: An American Burning. He produced it in collaboration with Belt Magazine, an excellent online publication about the Rust Belt. On this week’s Inner States, we’re presenting Episode 3 of Fire!: Inferno at Whiting, about the 1955 Whiting Refinery fire. We also talk with Ryan what we can learn from industrial fires about the modern world, our relationship to ecology and the climate, and how we organize society. Listen to this episode, and then go listen to the rest of his show on Spotify or at Belt Magazine.
