On March 4, 1908 in Cleveland, Ohio, a fire at Lake View school in Collinwood killed 165 children and 2 teachers (one died while guiding some children to fire escapes). The entire student population was 310 children, thus more than half died in the fire.

The story unfolds much like we have come to expect. The fire started in the basement from an unknown source (perhaps arson), the fire gong was sounded but everyone acted as if it were only a drill. Thus, only those on the first of three floors were able to get out of the building in time. It is claimed that the doors opened inward and therefore the press of panicked students from the upper floors precluded opening the doors.

All drills had used the front door as the primary exit, but the front door was inaccessible by the time the kids from the upper floors reached the first floor. This, in turn, made progress to the back door of the school somewhat chaotic. Then, it turns out the rear door was locked. Those children who made it to the bottom of the stairs tried to return to the upper floors but were met with more students coming down the stairs. The article points out "[w]hat happened at the foot of that first flight of stairs will never be knwn...[a]fter the flames had died away, however, a huge heap of little bodies, burned by the fire and trampled into things of horror, told the tale."

The paper provides a list of those children who had been identified. In total, they listed 120 of which 100 had ages reported. Here are the descriptive statistics and a histogram:

    Variable |       Obs        Mean    Std. Dev.       Min        Max
-------------+--------------------------------------------------------
          age |       100        9.97    2.341781          6         15

Thank goodness these type of events are incredibly rare.

Wikipedia Entry (with pictures) here: The Wikipedia entry reports that the doors didn't open inward. The original NYT article suggests that the building was designed with doors that opened outward but that it was not clear how the doors had been installed.