Disaster and Scandal: Denali's 1939 Superintendent's Residence Fire

By Erik Johnson, Denali Historian (National Park Service).

Smoke pouring from the Superintendent's Residence on October 23, 1939; on the left, the Rock House, then used as a garage. DENA 8-27.

On the morning of October 23, 1939, the Superintendent's Residence at Mount McKinley National Park burned down. Superintendent Frank Been and his wife Lorraine had arrived only a few months before. They lost much of what they owned, in late October, with the cold setting in, the days shortening, and no road to Fairbanks, Anchorage or even Healy for emergency supplies.

Then came the accusations. Soon after the fire, the park clerk's wife charged Lorraine Been with arson, insurance fraud and possessing narcotics, and the Department of the Interior opened an investigation. The investigators cleared both Beens. The fire was traced to a faulty chimney flue; it spread fast because constant heating had dried the house out, and the nearest firefighting equipment was two miles away at McKinley Park Station, too far to save it.

One lasting result: after the fire, five women living at Park Headquarters or McKinley Park Station formed the park's first women's club, to keep spirits up.

Two documents at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, tell the story: Been's memo written right after the fire, and a letter from the NPS Director about the charges.

The superintendent's account

Been's morning began as usual. At about 7:00 AM he checked the basement furnace, found the fire low, dumped the coals and ashes to clear the grates, and relit it with newspaper, kindling, a little fireplace wood and some kerosene-soaked sawdust. He opened the draft and damper, added coal once the wood caught, and added more before and after breakfast. He spent ten or fifteen minutes trying to pick up the park's radio broadcast from Wonder Lake, where equipment was being tested. At about 8:30 AM, the fire burning briskly and the weather mild, he closed the draft, left the damper open, and crossed the road to his office.

He had just finished his diary entries for the two previous days when he heard a woman shouting: Mrs. Been, woken upstairs by smoke, had come to tell him the house was full of it.

• He and the senior clerk found the house so smoky they could barely see or breathe. Smoke boiling up the cellar stairs drove them back; through a broken cellar window Been could see the stored fireplace wood burning, but could not get in. A one-quart extinguisher from the back porch did nothing.
• He telephoned the Alaska Road Commission, about two miles away, for help, then dragged out his writing desk, groping for photographs and notes in the smoke; much was lost.
• Mrs. Been slipped and fell on her way to the office for shelter, hurting her back badly, and was carried by stretcher to a bed in the Rangers' Dormitory.
• The chief clerk's 2-gallon extinguishers made no headway, and the house's fire hose was useless, stored in the basement beside its connections. When five men arrived from the Road Commission, some helped lay hose from the clerk's house while others carried out furniture, told not to risk being overcome.
• Been reached the second floor, threw clothing out of a window he broke with a chair, and climbed down a ladder the men had set against the wall.

By then the fire had reached the second floor, and there was nothing to do but let it burn. Water from the hose saved the garage, though badly scorched; the chief ranger started the pump to keep the 20,000-gallon reservoir full. By 11:30 AM, about two hours after Been left for work, only the cellar walls and the chimney remained of a two-storey, seven-room log house, tinder-dry after being heated almost constantly since it was furnished in 1930.

The cause

No more than twenty minutes passed between Been leaving the house and finding it full of smoke, and he had noticed no smoke or fumes in the basement when he left. Running back, he saw little smoke from the chimney and first assumed the furnace pipe had clogged.

He and the chief ranger weighed several causes:

• A gas explosion in the furnace. The park burned low-grade soft Alaskan coal, which often gave off more gas than the chimney could carry. Been had once seen the furnace door blow open this way. But after the fire the door was found closed and the pipe still attached.
• A live coal escaping through a gap between the furnace and the concrete floor after he raked the ashes. The chimney's clean-out, packed with ash, seemed an unlikely route for sparks.
• Wiring was ruled out: there was no power at the time.

The answer turned up while measuring the wreckage. The underside of the pipe between furnace and chimney was scaly and porous, so thin that his fingertips pushed through it like paper. In place since 1930, it had burned through over nine years; sparks could have fallen to the floor, lit the coal dust there and crept to the woodpile. Been kept the pipe as evidence. Chief Ranger Corbley and Corralman Herning were with him when it was found.

His recommendations

Been called the fire an ironic proof of the first thing he had noticed on taking charge: the park's almost pathetic lack of fire prevention and firefighting equipment. He had assigned Ranger Ogston, later chief ranger at Death Valley, to improve fire safety, but it was more than one man could do with what was at hand. In a remote park where fires burned nearly every day of the year, frame buildings dried out and the cold meant steam pipes ran in the trench beside the water pipes, the makeshift equipment was, in his words, almost a farce. It was the third fire in six years; he asked for priority in funding and equipment and for a specialist's advice, noting that recommendations without money would change nothing.

The charges

On February 19, 1940, NPS Director Arno B. Cammerer forwarded to the Secretary of the Interior a January 24 letter from Mrs. Lacie O. Janes, the clerk's wife, which in effect accused the Beens of setting the fire on purpose. Cammerer wrote that the letter's opening suggested isolation had worn on her judgment, and that arson by Been seemed unlikely: to him it looked as though Been had inherited a difficult staff situation and, in reorganising the park, had trodden on the Janes family's toes. The charges were serious enough, though, that he passed them to the Division of Investigations to act as it saw fit.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Disaster and Scandal: the 1939 Superintendent's Residence Fire," Denali History Nuggets. https://www.nps.gov/articles/dena-history-supt-residence-fire.htm
• Superintendent Frank Been, memorandum for the Director, October 1939; Director Arno B. Cammerer, memorandum for the Secretary, February 19, 1940. National Archives, College Park, Maryland.
• Series: previous, Started from the Bottom: A Mission from Death Valley to Denali on Horseback; next, Johnnie Busia: "Mayor of Kantishna".