As many as ten thousand people ended up homeless in a city of only fifty-seven thousand. The disaster led to the construction of the newer and larger McTavish Reservoir and to the dismissal of the city’s chief engineer, who had coordinated Montreal’s all-volunteer fire companies, for failing to respond fast enough to stop the blaze. Even though no one can say for sure when the Great Fire of Smyrna started, historians believe it was on September 13, 1922, and that it burned for almost nine days, until it was finally extinguished on September 22. It is estimated that nearly 100,000 Greeks and Armenian citizens died because of it.
