[PRCo] PRT 5326 versus the Flu

[Schneider Fred]

There was a rather sobering piece night on PBS's American Experience  
series on the 1918 influenza epidemic.

This link should lead to it on-line.

When ever I was running 5326, I always explained the retro wooden  
seats thusly:  "Thomas Mitten, the president of Philadelphia Rapid  
Transit had just been through the flu epidemic in 1918 ... just five  
years earlier ... that killed tens of thousands of Philadelphians (I  
think the number was close to 30,000) and he didn't want anything in  
his cars that he could not clean out with a hose.

The show pointed out the worst month was October 1918 and that deaths  
in that month peaked at 700 times over the base line.   That is  
difficult for me to imagine.   To put it into perspective, I had to  
think it terms of one page of obituaries in the Lancaster newspaper  
on a normal day (10 names) and realize that the obits would require  
700 pages a day in at the height of the catastrophe in October  
1918!    Now lets see 7,000 names x 30 days = 210,000 dead in one  
month?   That would be half of Lancaster County's population in one  
month.

The astonishing thing is that we didn't know what caused it and we  
didn't really know why it went away but by November 1918 it  
disappeared just as fast as it came.  At the rate it was going, there  
would have been no Philadelphia in two months time!

Makes it easy to understand why Mitten wanted wooden seats in 5326.

Worth listening too but it takes an hour of your time.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/