Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (14 page)

CAUSE FOR ALARM

WE’VE ALL GAZED UPWARD IN PUBLIC SPACES
to contemplate those little inverted metal rosettes that dot the ceiling at regular intervals — fire sprinklers. New or old, most utilize the elegantly simple design of multiple sprinkler heads, affixed to a constantly charged water line. Each sprinkler head has its own heat-activated trigger (a fusible metal link or liquid-filled glass vial designed to break at a predetermined temperature), so that all heads in the area of a fire, and only those heads, will be activated.

Fire sprinklers were not originally calculated to save lives; rather, they arose from a purely mercantile desire to preserve the huge “manufactories” and warehouses that were the great engines of the Industrial Revolution. However, more recent history demonstrates their life-saving potential in situations where seconds may be critical to crowd evacuation. One prime example was a fire at the Fine Line Music Café in Minneapolis, Minnesota, just three nights before Great White’s 2003 appearance at The Station. The similarities — and different outcomes — of the two fires are striking.

The Fine Line club opened in 1987 in the restored century-old Consortium Building in Minneapolis’ Warehouse District. It was a well-maintained two-tier performing space with a legal capacity of 720 patrons. At about 7:05 p.m. on February 17, 2003, an obscure opening band from Seattle, Jet City Fix, illegally ignited pyrotechnics that struck the club’s ceiling, setting it afire. Automatic sprinklers on the ceiling activated, quelling the blaze. When firemen arrived, all 120 club patrons had already been evacuated by the club’s staff without injury. The fire was completely extinguished in fifteen minutes, and the club reopened a month later after repairing about $100,000 worth of smoke and water damage. Automatic sprinklers at the Fine Line were a critical factor in averting a Station-like tragedy there.

Over the course of their development, fire sprinklers were not always automatic, and not always effective. One early attempt envisioned a large cask of water in which another cask of gunpowder, with a trailing fuse, was
suspended. The principle was that a fire would ignite the fuse, causing the gunpowder to explode and, along with it, the cask of water. Perhaps it was the flying cask shrapnel that gave pause, but the idea never really caught on.

Late in the eighteenth century, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, English factory and mill owners were the first to experiment with installing manually operated sprinkler systems. These devices consisted of multiple perforated pipes fed by a main riser, which was charged with water by a worker manually opening a valve in response to a fire. They were reasonably effective in dousing fires; however, damage to an entire floor or an entire building (and to its contents) from water could exceed the potential damage from fire. In short, these early systems were dependent upon human intervention for triggering, and they were nonselective in their application, wasting a vast amount of water where it was not needed and damaging valuable goods and property that might not have been in peril.

In 1806, Englishman John Carey had a slightly better idea. He devised a system of water pipes with several ceiling valves held closed by counterweights attached to strings. When flames burned through a string, its counterweight was released, opening the valve, releasing the water and extinguishing the fire. It addressed the problem of wasteful and potentially damaging deluges; however, its crude reliance on burning strings and falling weights made for inconsistent performance (and, perhaps, stronger firemen’s helmets). What was needed was a truly automatic sprinkler system that would reliably discharge water, unattended, on only the area of the fire. Again, economic calculation became the midwife, if not the mother, of invention.

Henry S. Parmelee was the president of the Mathusek Piano Works in New Haven, Connecticut. In the 1870s, insurance rates for factories were exorbitant due to the toll exacted by fires, which, once begun, more often than not consumed entire buildings. Parmelee addressed the problem by developing and installing in his piano works the first closed-head fire sprinkler, which he patented and called “the automatic fire extinguisher.” The Parmelee sprinkler head had a sealed orifice designed to open with sufficient heat. He understood that the only way to cost-justify his system would be to convince insurers that a factory using his system deserved lower premiums, an underwriting principle that has survived to the present. Parmelee’s sprinkler head, while a vast improvement over string-suspended counterweights, lacked sufficient sensitivity to trigger early in a conflagration, because its fusible seal remained in direct contact with cool water in the pipe.

It is no small irony for the victims of the Station fire that the first practical automatic sprinkler head was developed ten miles to the club’s north
in Providence, Rhode Island, by Frederick Grinnell. In 1881, Grinnell, who had been manufacturing Parmelee’s system for him, designed and patented a more effective version that became known as the Grinnell sprinkler. Its design removed the heat-fusible link from all contact with water in the system, greatly increasing its sensitivity. Featuring the same round, tooth-edged deflector seen on sprinkler heads today, the Grinnell sprinkler design became, and remains, the standard for modern “wet-pipe” fire suppression systems.

Why, then, wasn’t this Rhode Island–born boon to fire safety installed at The Station? After all, in 2003, the state building code, modeled on the National Fire Protection Association’s (
NFPA
) Life Safety Code, required sprinklers in all places of public assembly occupied by more than three hundred people. On its face, the law would seem to have mandated sprinklers at the nightclub.

The answer lies in a legislative device known as “grandfathering,” a deceptively benign-sounding term. What grandfathering meant in the context of The Station is that buildings constructed before the effective date of the sprinkler requirement were exempt from it unless they had undergone a “change in use or occupancy.” The building at 211 Cowesett Avenue had seen use as a sit-down restaurant with a legal capacity of 161, then a bar with a capacity of 225, and, ultimately, a concert venue that Fire Marshal Denis Larocque certified in March 2000 as fit for 404 screaming, shoulder-to-shoulder rock fans. Neither Larocque nor anyone else in authority seemed to consider this evolution a “change in use or occupancy.”

Common sense would suggest that there had been a change in use requiring sprinklers; however, economics always trumped safety at The Station. A sprinkler system for the club would have cost only $39,000 — the exact sum of the two deposits taken by the Derderians from would-be club purchasers Armando Machado and Michael O’Connor, and far less than the $65,000 they spent on The Station’s sound system. Like confetti machines, however, sprinklers would not be found at The Station on the Derderians’ watch.

Whether sprinklers would have saved every life lost at The Station is debatable; what is certain is that they would have greatly reduced the carnage there. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (
NIST
), an agency of the federal government charged with investigating manmade disasters and making recommendations for regulatory changes, investigated the Station fire.
NIST
scientists produced computer simulations and full-scale mock-ups of the fire, both with and without sprinklers. The non-sprinklered model tracked the fire’s progress approximately as seen in Brian Butler’s video, with
temperatures exceeding 1,000°C (1830°F) in the dance floor area and 500°C (930°F) in the main bar area in less than two minutes. In the model with sprinklers, the fire was extinguished within two minutes, and conditions within the building remained survivable at all times.

While fire
suppression
may keep conditions tenable, allowing escape, fire
detection
can still play a role in hastening evacuation, particularly from places of public assembly. This is because, even if a fire develops in plain sight of an assembled crowd, human behavioral factors can “freeze” victims for critical seconds while they remain oblivious of their peril.

The late Guylene Proulx, who taught civil and environmental engineering at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, studied crowd behavior in fires. She described a phenomenon called “commitment,” when people are confronted with fire in an entertainment venue. After watching the Brian Butler video of the Station fire, Professor Proulx made the observation: “The people paid good money to hear the band, and they were going to continue watching, in denial of what they were seeing. Members of the public are very ill-prepared to judge the danger of fire. We just don’t have experience with anything but controlled fire in a fireplace or campsite setting. We have no idea how building fires can build exponentially in a matter of seconds.”

Proulx explained that people need to be roused from their state of commitment to an entertainment activity by fire alarms that trigger early and are unmistakable in their clarity. Ideally, all entertainment activity should cease and the crowd be focused on orderly evacuation. This is where detection systems prove their worth.

What fire detection existed at The Station at the time of the fire had been installed in 2000 when Howard Julian sold the club to the Derderians. At that time, West Warwick Fire Department director of communications John Pieczarek advised Joseph LaFontaine, a licensed alarm installer hired by Julian, as to what system features would be acceptable to the town. They included new heat detectors near the stage and several new pull stations around the club. The system remained, however, a “local” system, designed to warn occupants with a loud horn and flashing strobe lights, but not automatically call the fire department.

LaFontaine installed three heat detectors in the area of the stage. One, underneath the stage structure, was a rate-of-rise detector. It was designed to trigger when nearby temperatures rose several degrees within a ten-second period. The other two were fixed temperature detectors — one set for 195°F, located a foot from the peak of the ceiling above the stage, and another set for 135°F, on the ceiling of the drummer’s alcove. Fixed temperature detectors
were installed on the two ceilings because rate-of-rise devices, while more sensitive, can be falsely triggered by powerful, heat-generating stage lights.

The Station’s alarm system had several “Pull in Case of Fire” boxes throughout the club. One was mounted at the sound/light board on the theory that the sound board would always be attended during a concert, and, in the event of an emergency, the sound system could be silenced and the alarm box pulled manually, much like the circa-1800 English system for perforated-pipe sprinklers in factories. That part of the system intended to eliminate the club’s major distraction, loud music, was, however, dependent upon human judgment and intervention, which are themselves susceptible to Professor Proulx’s “commitment” phenomenon.

When Dan Biechele set off the pyrotechnics at The Station, Bob Rager, Great White’s man at the sound board, had his head down and was concentrating on the mixing console. Rager didn’t notice the flaming walls until the music suddenly stopped and he looked up. Great White stopped playing thirty-six seconds post-ignition, causing the crowd for the first time to focus exclusively on the danger at hand. Club lighting technician Scooter Stone finally activated the pull box beside him no earlier than fifty seconds after the gerbs were first ignited. It remains unclear whether the alarm was actually triggered by a heat detector or by Stone’s action, although it is hard to believe that temperatures above the drummer’s alcove and the stage had not earlier exceeded 135°F and 195°F, respectively. What is clear is that well over a half minute of evacuation time was lost to many whose escape window was only ninety seconds.

Whether a nightclub’s staff responds immediately and properly to a fire emergency depends entirely upon its training. The Station’s employees were given no instruction on how to respond to emergencies, despite the well-publicized deaths of twenty-one people at the
E2
Club in Chicago just three days before Great White’s appearance. Instead, Jeff Derderian’s reaction to the Chicago tragedy was to shoot generic video at his own club so that he could narrate a sensationalized piece about nightclub safety.

Other clubs, however, responded more substantively to Chicago’s wakeup call. Management of the Fine Line Café in Minneapolis reviewed safety procedures with its staff on February 17 in response to the deaths earlier that day in Chicago. When Jet City Fix’s pyro ignited the Fine Line’s ceiling that very evening, club staff immediately, and successfully, directed all patrons to the exits.

It didn’t hurt that the Fine Line’s crowd was well below its legal maximum when fire broke out. That was not the case at The Station. Whereas the Fine
Line Café’s management reviewed club capacity and drilled its employees in evacuation procedures, the Derderians’ response to the Chicago deaths was to sell business cards and pieces of notebook paper when they ran out of printed tickets for the Great White concert. No cash patron was turned away from the door that night. As reconstructed by the
Providence Journal
from post-fire interviews, it is reliably believed that no fewer than 462 people were inside The Station (officially inflated capacity, 404) when fire broke out.

When Dan Biechele closed the circuit to his illegal pyro setup on the night of the fire, he could not have known the many hazards surrounding him: walls lined with “solid gasoline”; no sprinkler system; an overcrowded club with staff untrained in fire procedures. But even if some of those perils had been eliminated, it still would not have guaranteed people’s safety. Because all had to exit quickly. And an exit is worthless if it’s not known, if it’s the
only one
known or, worse yet, if someone denies you its use. The Station had all three.

CHAPTER 12