I was a sophomore in engineering school and this was a big thing when it happened as the students and professors speculated a lot about what might have caused this. Of particular interest was that my roommate's fiancé's father owned a company in Massachusetts which supplied some of the wiring harnesses which were used in the Apollo 1 capsule and it took years before the investigators finally decided that there was no reason to suspect that the material that his company manufactured played any role in causing the fire, but in the meantime he almost lost his company, his health went in the toilet and he died a few years later. And before you ask, yes, my roommate and his fiancé did get married and they still live near Humble, TX (he was a geologist and worked for several years in the oil industry for companies which gathered and evaluated seismic data looking for oil bearing formations).
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/27/apollo-1-anniversary_n_1237189.html
OCU
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