Significant Illinois fires are listed in the library guides of the University of Illinois. I expected to see the Iroquois Theater Fire on November 23, 1903, and the Our Lady of Angels school fire in 1958 on the list. I did not expect to see the Illinois Bell Telephone Fire on Mother’s Day, May 8, 1988, on the list.
The Hinsdale Central Office of the Illinois Bell Telephone Company housed one of the largest switching stations in Illinois. It processed over 3.5 million calls each day and served 38,000 customers including businesses, hospitals, Midway and O’Hare airport and private customers.
On May 8, 1988, a fire broke out in the switching room, and it went undetected for almost an hour. Smoke began pouring out of the building and phone service was disrupted for much of the area. A technician had to flag down a motorist and ask for a ride to the Hinsdale Fire Station to report the fire.
Firefighters arrived and found that dry chemical extinguishers would not extinguish the fire. They could not attack the fire with water without exposing themselves to the threat of electrical shock. Because the telephone lines were down, they could not contact Commonwealth Edison to turn off the electricity, so they had to manually disconnect all the building’s fuses. That took almost two hours.
Toxic fumes were being emitted from the burning fiber optic equipment and more than 300 civilians living in a five-block radius of the building were evacuated. Ten firefighters were treated at Hinsdale Hospital for chemical fume inhalation.
It took Illinois Bell four weeks to completely restore telephone service for the entire affected region.
One of the areas that lost telephone service was Mayslake Village, a retirement community in Oak Brook. My mother was one of the hundreds of mothers living at Mayslake. Five of her daughters lived locally and all got to personally wish her a happy Mother’s Day. Two of her daughters lived in Michigan and had not been able to call before the fire affected service. They were like so many other children of Mayslake residents who didn’t want to wait for weeks to talk to their moms.
Illinois Bell brought in a trailer with “workstations” equipped with phones so that the Mayslake residents could call their loved ones. Illinois Bell provided these calls free of charge. The Mother’s Day call might have been a day late, but at least all the moms could “reach out and touch” their loved ones. The trailers remained at Mayslake until service was restored.
It would be nice to think that every mom will be able to talk to their children this year. But for some moms, their children are serving in the military, and they may not be able to call them. Their children may be deployed on submarines. Or maybe they are serving in areas or on ships that don’t have telephone service. But whether they receive a call or not, they know that they are loved and missed.
Have a wonderful Mother’s Day!
