LOCAL HISTORY: BOILER BLAST KILLED 22 AT DENVER HOTEL AS OPERATOR VISITED SALOON

Photo: The Locomotive

On Aug. 19, 1895, a boiler exploded at downtown Denver's Gumry Hotel while the boiler operator was at a saloon. The explosion killed 22 people including Peter Gumry, proprietor.

 "Naught but the walls were left intact," the Aspen Weekly Times reported. A Utah newspaper called it "a gaunt and sinister ruin."

The hotel was located on Lawrence Street between Seventeenth and Eighteenth streets.

"The firemen, with light and torch, entered all parts of the hotel," an insurance industry trade journal reported journal. "Out of the pile of brick, wood and iron below came feeble moans and piteous cries."

Author Howard Potter Dunham, writing in a 1912 textbook entitled "The Business of Insurance," said the boiler was low on water. 

James Murphy, trapped in the ruins, pleaded with firemen to amputate his leg. Moments later a wall collapsed and buried Murphy. He died.

M.E. Letson, a dairyman, who waited 10 hours for rescuers to reach him, told a newspaper correspondent of his ordeal:

"You cannot have the slightest idea of my feelings as I lay there in the bottom of the basement with all the ruins on top and around me, hearing the excruciating cries of the dying and those in agony and being almost overcome by the shock, and also soaked with water and almost drowned and fearing that the next minute I would be buried alive."

A newspaper said: "Cries of a babe and the moans of men and women could be heard, but the flames and smoke increased, and finally the voices were all silenced."

Three Denver firemen - P. Gilchrist, J.E. Troy and Louis Maguire - were injured when a wall collapsed and "were almost suffocated to death by smoke and dust," according to a news dispatch. They survived.

Boiler operator Helmuth Loescher fled Denver but returned to face investigators.

A coroner's jury determined it was impossible to assign blame, according to the October 1895 edition of The Locomotive, a publication of the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company.

The jury assailed Gumry and his business partner for allowing Loescher to work long hours; censured Loescher for negligence; and criticized the city boiler inspector for lax procedures and standards.