Great Baltimore Fire and piers lining the north side of the old "Basin" (today's "Inner Harbor") of the Northwest Branch of the Baltimore Harbor and Patapsco River facing along Pratt Street. It is considered historically the third worst conflagration in an American city, surpassed only by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906. Other major urban disasters that were comparable (but not fires) were the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and most recently, Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico coast in August 2005. One reason for the fire's long duration involved
Great fire of Tirschenreuth Great fire of Tirschenreuth The Great fire of Tirschenreuth took place on 30 July 1814 and destroyed nearly all of Tirschenreuth, a small town and regional centre in the east of Bavaria, close to the frontier with Bohemia. The great fire was the greatest catastrophe in the town's history apart from the invasion by Swedish troops that took place in the context of the Thirty Years' War two centuries earlier. The fire was discovered between 9 and 10 in the morning in the storage barn of a toy maker called Joseph Scherbaum. The cause of the fire is unclear, although