Fire regulations had been flouted: some exit doors had been locked to prevent unauthorized entry, and the elaborate palm tree décor contained flammable materials.

Local hospitals were especially well prepared to treat the casualties having been rehearsing emergency drills in response to possible wartime attacks on the East Coast.

[1][2] Ownership passed to his lawyer Barnet "Barney" Welansky,[2] who sought a more mainstream image for the club while privately boasting of his ties to the mob and Boston Mayor Maurice J. Tobin.

The "Grove" had become one of Boston's most popular nightspots, featuring a restaurant and dancing in the main area, floor shows, and piano-playing entertainers in the Melody Lounge.

[citation needed] Wall coverings and decorative materials had been approved on the basis of tests for ordinary ignition, which showed resistance to combustion from sources such as matches and cigarettes.

Decorative cloth was purportedly treated with fire retardant ammonium sulfate upon installation, but there was no documentation that the treatment was maintained at the required intervals.

[citation needed] On the night of the fire Welansky was recovering from a heart attack in a private room at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).

A fireball burst through the front entryway and spread through the remaining club areas: through the adjacent Caricature Bar, down a corridor to the Broadway Lounge, and across the central restaurant and dance floor as the orchestra was beginning its evening show.

Well-known film actor Buck Jones was at the club that night, and his wife later explained that he had initially escaped and then gone back into the burning building to find his agent, producer Scott R. Dunlap of Monogram Pictures.

Although several members of the band died, including musical director Bernie Fazioli, most of them escaped backstage and through a service door that they rammed open.

Bartender Daniel Weiss survived by dousing a cloth napkin with a pitcher of water and breathing through it as he made his escape from the Melody Lounge.

Its report reached no conclusion as to the initial cause of ignition but attributed the rapid, gaseous spread of the fire to a buildup of carbon monoxide gas from oxygen-deprived combustion in the enclosed space above the false ceiling of the Melody Lounge.

The gas exuded from enclosed spaces as its temperature rose and ignited rapidly as it mixed with oxygen above the entryway, up the stairway to the main floor and along ceilings.

[9] During the 1990s, former Boston firefighter and researcher Charles Kenney discovered that a highly flammable gas refrigerant, methyl chloride, had been used as a substitute for freon, which was in short wartime supply.

Kenney also reported that photographic evidence indicates an origin for the fire in the wall behind the palm tree and suggested ignition of methyl chloride accelerant by an electrical failure caused by substandard wiring.

[20] Witnesses Tomaszewski, Morris Levy, Joyce Spector, David Frechtling and Jeanette Lanzoni (Volume 1) provided accounts of the ignition of the palm decoration and ceiling in the Melody Lounge.

Witness Roland Sousa (Volume 2) stated that he was initially unconcerned about the fire because, as a regular customer of the Melody Lounge, he had seen the palm tree decorations ignite before and they were always quickly put out.

These later became the basis for several federal fire laws and code restrictions placed on nightclubs, theaters, banks, public buildings, and restaurants across the nation.

One of the first administrative decisions made at MGH was to clear the general surgery ward on the sixth floor of the White Building and devote it entirely to victims of the fire.

[7] Prior to the fire, in April 1942, MGH had established one of the area's first blood banks, and had stocked it with 200 units of dried plasma as part of preparations for the war.

[31][32] Surgeons Francis Daniels Moore and Oliver Cope at MGH pioneered fluid resuscitation techniques for the burn victims, noting that the majority of patients suffered from severe hemorrhagic tracheobronchitis because of "prolonged inhalation of the very hot air and fumes which presumably contained many toxic products...and, in addition, numerous hot particles of fine carbon or similar substances.

Careful evaluations showed no evidence of pulmonary edema, and Finland's studies at BCH concluded that "the fluids seemed to produce obvious improvement in most instances without any apparent adverse effect on the respiratory system.

[33][32] The standard surface burn treatment in use at the time was the so-called "tanning process" involving the application of a solution of tannic acid, which created a leathery scab over the wound that protected against the invasion of bacteria and prevented the loss of bodily fluids.

[35] At MGH, burns were treated with a new technique pioneered by Cope and refined by Bradford Cannon: soft gauze covered with petroleum jelly and boric acid ointment.

[32][23] In early December Merck and Company rushed a 32-liter supply of the drug in the form of culture liquid in which the Penicillium mold had been grown, from Rahway, New Jersey, to Boston.

These patients received 5,000 IU (roughly 2.99 mg) every four hours, a small dose by today's standards, but at the time antibiotic resistance was rare, and most strains of Staphylococcus aureus were penicillin-sensitive.

[40] Erich Lindemann, an MGH psychiatrist, studied the survivors of the dead and published what has become a classic paper, "Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief",[42][36] read at the Centenary Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 1944.

At the same time Lindemann was laying the foundation for the study of grief and dysfunctional grieving, Alexandra Adler conducted psychiatric observations and questionnaires over eleven months with more than 500 survivors of the fire, publishing some of the earliest research on post-traumatic stress disorder.

"[44] Adler also discovered one survivor with a lasting brain lesion who presented symptoms of visual agnosia, most likely caused by exposure to carbon monoxide fumes, other noxious gases and/or a lack of sufficient oxygen.

As a result of that terrible tragedy, major changes were made in the fire codes, and improvements in the treatment of burn victims, not only in Boston but across the nation.