Killer Show

by John Barylick

  Band members Mark Kendall and David Filice stood outside the stage door with the Cormiers, having exited only moments before. Their guitars were still strapped on, and both gazed in disbelief as flames engulfed the building. Tim Cormier patted Kendall on the shoulder and remarked, “Nice show, man.” No one laughed.

  As luck would have it, another person stood near the band door that night when Dan Biechele ignited Great White’s pyro. Photographer Dan Davidson had stopped at The Station earlier that afternoon to buy a ticket to the Great White show. By then the club was out of tickets, so Davidson was given a business card with the words “Admit One” written on the back. When he returned to the club around 10 that night he carried a high-resolution digital camera. Davidson had shot concert photos at The Station before and hoped to get marketable pictures once again.

  Davidson took four photos in succession, beginning shortly after Jack Russell jumped onstage. In the first, sparks fill the stage, striking the front corner walls of the drummer’s alcove and its lintel above. From left to right in the frame are Al Prudhomme’s shoulder, Scott Vieira’s back, Kelly Vieira’s back, the leather-jacketed back of club regular and occasional bouncer Mario Giamei, and — at center frame — John Arpin, his shaved head turned to the right as he watches Dan Biechele touching off the pyro from offstage. Biechele’s hair is just visible to the right of a wooden pillar. Vieira and Arpin each wear black T-shirts with EVENT SECURITY or EVENT STAFF stenciled on their backs.

  The second Davidson photo was snapped just after the fifteen-second gerbs stopped showering sparks. From left to right appear Kelly Vieira’s shoulder, Mark Kendall onstage, then the backs of Scott Vieira and Mario Giamei. All but Kendall are facing the drummer’s alcove, the corner walls of which are engulfed in two-foot-high flames. At the frame’s right edge, Dan Biechele’s hair can be seen, as well as the foam-covered surface of the closed inner stage door.

  In the third photo, Dan Biechele stands at center stage with a flashlight clenched in his teeth, staring up at the flames, which now roar up the alcove walls, ten feet up the proscenium arch. At the photo’s left edge, Al Prudhomme’s cowboy hat and sports jersey are visible. Kelly Vieira is no longer in the frame.

  In the fourth photo, flames rage from floor to ceiling on the stage. Donna Cormier’s hand appears in the lower left, pointing toward the stage exit. The head of Ty Longley’s guitar can be seen onstage, and drummer Eric Powers stands at center stage staring back at the engulfed alcove he has just escaped. Behind him, David Filice bends to drag his amplifier away from the flames. Dan Biechele, sunglasses on head and flashlight in hand, heads offstage, toward the camera. A blonde female, possibly one of the Conant sisters, walks behind a wooden pillar on her way out the stage door, just ahead of the band. She passes by the outstretched left arm of dark-haired Scott Vieira who stands in the path to the stage door with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The inward-swinging stage door has been opened for the blonde-haired woman. In the foreground sits a cardboard box that had accompanied Great White from Glendale Heights, Illinois, to West Warwick, Rhode Island, with many stops in between. It bears a bright orange label reading, EXPLOSIVE.

  Nine days after the fire, Donna Cormier reviewed the Davidson photographs with the Rhode Island State Police. She positively identified John Arpin as the shaved-headed bouncer who had tried to turn her family away from the stage door.

  According to the Rhode Island Department of the Attorney General, twenty-four people got out through the stage door exit, all without injury. Only four of them had actually been onstage at the time of the fire. Counting persons associated with Great White, Fathead, Trip, and the club itself (including the Conant sisters in this group), there were a total of twelve “with the band.” Since four of the remaining twelve persons were the Cormier family (whom a bouncer tried to deny egress), only eight other “civilians” passed through the stage door in the full minute between pyro ignition and complete closure of the exit due to fire. Clearly, others were denied its use.

  At least one person chose not to use the stage exit, however — even though he had used it all night. Ty Longley, Great White’s rhythm guitarist, did not head offstage to the adjacent door with his bandmates. Rather, when Longley spotted his friend Bill Long (Trip’s road manager) in the center of the club, he jumped off the stage and ran to him, saying, “C’mon, let’s get out of here, bro.” Long and Longley made their way through the heat and smoke toward the atrium, that curious vestige of ’70s architecture along the club’s front wall, which featured curved Plexiglas panels arching from ceiling to floor along its entire length. The atrium deceptively suggested a possible escape route for panicked patrons; however, its “windows” were actually impenetrable save for three low glass (rather than Plexiglas) panels at widely separated locations. The Derderians had pushed three pool tables up against the windows, in order to garner more standing-room space. The result was a billiard barricade that kept victims from the few breakable panels.

  Long pounded on the Plexiglas with his fists and kicked them with his motorcycle boots. At one point he crawled onto a pool table and kicked at the panels backwards, like a horse — all to no avail. He looked up, and Ty was right in front of him; then Longley disappeared from view. Long reached for pool cues, but everything he touched burned his hands. He fell to the floor, passing in and out of consciousness as others trampled him. Long found himself next to the table where Great White T-shirts had been sold just a few minutes earlier by a woman named Linda Fisher.

  Linda Fisher didn’t work for Great White. She was a Station regular who was usually “comped in.” The Great White concert was no exception. However, as a friend of the house, she was pressed into service to sell Great White merchandise when no one else was available.

  Doffing her own blousy shirt and donning instead a cotton Great White tank top, Linda sold her goods from a corner of the atrium beside the pool tables that had been pushed against the curved Plexiglas windows. Her friend Debra Wagner helped out. From Linda’s vantage point she could only see the right side of the stage — but when Great White set off its pyro, she saw immediately that one wall had caught fire. Wagner suggested they try for the front door, but Fisher replied, “350 people and one door doesn’t work. We’ll be crushed.”

  Linda grabbed a box of Great White CDS “to insure they wouldn’t be hassled by the bouncer guarding the stage door,” but as the pair headed for the stage door, the smoke and heat struck them head-on. They would never make it that far. Linda told Debra to get down on the floor with her and wait “until the sprinklers come on.” When no sprinklers came on, Linda thought, “Oh, shit, what did I do?” With Debra still on the floor, Linda stood up and placed both hands against the atrium windows. Her lips blistering and arms searing in the intense heat, she kicked at one glass pane set among the atrium’s Plexiglas panels. The glass would not yield. According to Fisher, she then “made her peace with God.”

  At that moment, Patrolman Mark Knott arrived outside the same glass pane with his expandable metal baton in hand. He smashed through the pane and ran the baton around its frame, clearing away shards of glass. Knott and others reached inside to pull Debra Wagner through the opening. Then, Linda Fisher. Both survived, but Fisher suffered grievous burns to her face and arms. Ironically, her Great White tank top protected some of her torso from even worse burns.

  Bill Long was somehow pulled through the same window, his hands and face blistered by the heat. He stumbled to a snow bank and thrust his hands into its coldness. His friend Ty Longley was not nearly as fortunate. In joining Long, rather than slipping out the nearest exit, Longley had made a fatal choice.

  Rob Feeney and Donna Mitchell had not been given any choice by the dark-haired, cigarette-smoking bouncer who turned them away from the stage door. As Rob rested his head on Donna’s motionless legs in the choking blackness and volcanic heat, he felt someone tap him on the left shoulder. He reached around but felt no one. When he felt the tapping again, he started kicking h
is feet. Realizing that he was not dead, Feeney started to crawl out over lumps he later realized were bodies. The ceiling above him glowed, dripping molten plastic onto the floor, where it consumed the flesh of his hands and fingers. He came upon a wall and followed it to an opening, which he pulled himself through, tumbling onto the concrete outside the atrium. Rob dragged himself to Great White’s tour bus and leaned up against it. Firefighters told him he was seriously hurt and doused him with snow. While awaiting transport to the hospital, Feeney noticed a shadow to his right, which he perceived to be his fiancée, Donna. Two firefighters picked him up and carried him away from the burning building. As Feeney was being moved, he saw the atrium roof collapse.

  It wasn’t until Rob Feeney left the intensive care unit of Rhode Island Hospital that he learned Donna Mitchell had died inside The Station. He later identified Scott Vieira from the Davidson photographs as the dark-haired, cigarette-smoking bouncer who refused him and Donna passage through the stage door.

  Gina Russo needed no photographs to positively, and vehemently, identify the bouncer who turned her and Fred Crisostomi away from the band door. One year after the fire, she unexpectedly came face to face with him at a function for Station fire families. Her reaction was so immediate, and visceral, that she flinched and lost her balance, falling back into a nearby chair. All she could say was, “Oh, my God, it’s you!” He responded, smirking, “Yeah.”

  Other survivors reported being pushed or thrown, unconscious, through a broken atrium window by someone on the inside. Bouncer Tracy King, at six-foot-two and three hundred pounds, is seen onstage in a late photograph by Dan Davidson, silhouetted against the flames. The cheerful giant, who once balanced a canoe on his chin on the David Letterman show, could never have fit through an atrium window himself. Some believe that King threw others out until he was felled by the smoke and heat inside.

  CHAPTER 13

  FIGHTING FOR AIR

  “FIRE IS AN EXOTHERMIC OXIDATION REACTION that proceeds at such a rate that it generates detectable heat and light.” So begins a standard textbook on the science of fire.

  However scientifically accurate that definition may be, it does not begin to convey fire’s power to consume wood, flesh, and the very oxygen that sustains life — so rapidly that escape from it may be impossible. Describing fire as a “self-sustaining chain reaction requiring combustible fuel, oxygen and energy” is a little like explaining death as “the cessation of heartbeat and brain activity.” It kind of misses the central point.

  A more useful approach to fire, at least as regards its ability to harm man, might be to view it as a living organism competing with nearby humans for a limited resource — oxygen. Both fire and mankind need oxygen to sustain themselves. Fire requires about a 16 percent concentration of oxygen to survive; we require 12 percent to function unimpaired. Room air has only 21 percent oxygen. The result of this shortfall is a most unhealthy competition.

  Fire and humans both engage in a process called oxidation. Humans do it on a cellular metabolic level; fire, on a much larger scale. While we tend to think of fire as the destruction of matter, the laws of chemistry tell us that matter is not destroyed but is, instead, changed in form. This can either be a physical change, such as changing from a liquid to a gas, or else it is a chemical change, in which its elements are recombined. Fire is an example of the second type: a chemical change by which fuel is broken down and its elements (predominantly carbon) recombined with oxygen in the process of oxidation.

  Two big differences between the two contenders for oxygen are their rates of its consumption and the weapons available to each. Fire is a voracious oxidizer. Our bodies’ cells work at a slower, but no less imperative pace. Fire’s arsenal in this contest includes heat and poisonous gases; ours, only water and our wits. Each combatant is quite capable of destroying the other to obtain the precious O2. From a human standpoint, when it comes to fire, it is a case of survival of the fittest. The choices are kill, escape, or be killed. Without a sprinkler system in place, the first option — killing the fire — was unattainable, and the patrons of The Station nightclub had the second option for only a woefully short period of time. In the end, the third option asserted itself.

  Fire can be defeated in the battle by removing any of its three prerequisites: fuel, oxygen, or heat. Take away any one, and the fire goes out. Increase one or more, and the blaze increases, potentially spreading to other fuels. Since fire is a chain reaction, an increase in its intensity means an increase in generated heat — which itself feeds the cycle of fuel and oxygen consumption — until one of the three elements is exhausted.

  Humans can lose the contest because of fire’s heat, its toxic byproducts, or its consumption of oxygen. Any one will do. In order to escape these perils, we have to understand how fire develops. A good starting point is the nature of flame.

  We all know that fuel can be solid, like a log in a fireplace. Few of us realize, however, that only a gas or vapor burns with a flame. When we see a “flaming log” we are actually watching combustion of gases being driven from the solid log in a process called pyrolysis. The same is true of a burning candle. Wax melts, undergoes pyrolysis, and the resulting gas burns with a visible flame. The initial heat to begin the chain reaction must come from an external source. But once fire begins, it produces enough heat itself to continue pyrolysis and the chain reaction we call burning.

  In the Station fire, before polyurethane foam on the walls could burst into flame, the solid foam had to undergo pyrolysis from the heat of the gerbs’ sparks striking it. The process was aided by the low-density, open-celled nature of the foam, as well as by the foam’s shape. The peaks and valleys of the foam’s convolutions were perfect for catching sparks and maintaining them in contact with the plastic long enough for it to pyrolyze and liberate flammable gases, which then burned with a visible flame. All this occurred within seconds of the gerbs’ initial ignition by Dan Biechele. Once begun, the chain reaction accelerated, such that any manual attempt to extinguish it after the first minute would likely have met with failure.

  Critical to any fire’s growth is its ability to transfer heat to new fuels. To understand heat transfer is to understand our rival’s game plan. Heat can be transferred in three ways: conduction, convection, and radiation. Conduction is the transfer of heat energy by direct contact with a warmer object. Convection is the transfer of heat by a moving medium, such as air. The third method of heat transfer — radiation — is the least understood but perhaps most important to the growth and propagation of fires. Radiation is the transfer of energy between two objects across a space via electromagnetic waves, largely infrared, but sometimes within the visible spectrum.

  On a trip to the beach we experience all three types of heat transfer. When our feet touch the hot sand, we feel conductive heat directly from the sand. As the warm breeze caresses us, we feel convective heat from the medium of the air. And when we step from under our umbrella into the sunshine, sensing immediate warmth, we are basking in the sun’s radiant heat, transmitted over millions of miles through the vacuum of space and the gases of our earth’s atmosphere.

  Scientists measure the radiant power of a fire by its “heat flux.” Radiation is critical to the growth of building fires, and is often responsible for fires becoming unsurvivable. It certainly was so in the case of The Station. The entire west wall of the club became a source of powerful heat flux within ninety seconds, transmitting radiant energy across the concert space to be absorbed by all in its path.

  We tend to think of fire as survivable if only we can avoid contact with its flames. That is, sadly, mistaken, but we are not entirely to blame for that belief. The misperception is fueled by TV shows and movies like Backdraft, in which Kurt Russell and William Baldwin emote for minutes on end amid cinematic flames and vaporized propylene glycol “smoke” within a “structure,” seemingly unaffected by convective heat, radiant heat, or, equally important, toxic byproducts of combustion. Would that this were po
ssible.

  In fact, fire’s contest with humans for oxygen is anything but a fair fight. In addition to its daunting heat, fire’s weapons include gases and vapors that are incompatible with human survival. Because hydrogen is found in almost all fuels, the burning of virtually any common fuel results in the production of water in vapor form. It is sometimes seen condensing on the cold windows of burning structures. We don’t think of fires as producing water vapor because when we sit in front of a fireplace, most water vapor exits up the chimney. We feel the fire’s radiant energy as a completely “dry” heat. But the atmosphere in a structure fire is much more steam room than sauna — and for that reason, far less tolerable. Copious amounts of water vapor remain contained within a burning room. Think of the immediate change in perceived temperature when water is splashed on a sauna’s hot coals, transforming a comfortable dry heat into scalding hyper-humidity. It is the latter condition that patrons of The Station struggled to escape, many bearing flash burns of their heads and hands, delineated from unburned skin by collar and cuff lines.

  In addition to the water vapor, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide that constitute the most common byproducts of combustion, a structure fire generates great quantities of flammable unburned gas liberated from the solid fuel. These gases rise and gather in the fire’s smoke layer unless vented, until they combine with sufficient oxygen and heat to ignite. It is the stuff of firefighters’ nightmares.