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Plague and Fire
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In addition to the physical destruction of almost one-fifth of the city’s buildings, the great fire also stripped at least five thousand people—more than an eighth of the city’s population—of their homes, their businesses, and all the personal possessions they were unable to carry. Roughly half the victims were Chinese; the rest were predominately Japanese and Hawaiian. Few of the refugees felt any loyalty to the government that had placed Emerson, Day, and Wood in charge of the public’s health. On the contrary, many of them suspected that the day’s fire was a white plot to ruin or even to exterminate them. Everything they had worked so hard to accumulate had been obliterated, and they realized they would now be completely at the mercy of the very authorities who had been ordering the fires in the first place. By the end of the day, many district’s residents were clearly in shock as the enormity of what happened and the desperation of their own situations began to sink in. Somewhat miraculously, no one had been killed in the disaster. But the day’s events had instantly disrupted thousands of lives to an extent no one could have imagined when they awoke that balmy morning.
To make matters worse, everyone inside the Chinatown district had already been under strict quarantine as part of the physicians’ campaign to contain the epidemic. As the fire continued to expand, Honolulu citizens from outside the quarantined zone massed on the periphery of Chinatown. They were determined to prevent a general dispersal of the residents trapped inside the district, fearing they might carry the plague uncontrollably throughout the city. Consequently, all of the refugees would now have to be confined in detention camps to make sure they were not carrying the disease. In addition to the consequences of the great fire, after all, Honolulu still had an epidemic of bubonic plague on its hands.
Emerson, Day, and Wood spent the rest of the night trying to respond to the short-term consequences of the catastrophe. Order had to be restored to the city and thousands of terrified people, who were already under armed guard, had to be fed, housed, and resettled. As a smoldering glow illuminated nighttime clouds, the three physicians began to face the fact that a policy they initiated in the name of public health had produced the worst civic disaster in Hawaiian history. The long-term consequences of what had happened could hardly be contemplated.
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Copyright © 2005 University of Oregon
Updated May 25, 2005
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