At 11:17 p.m. a West Warwick police dispatcher received a 911 call from “a female trapped inside and in need of help.” If Bridget Sanetti and Katie O’Donnell were in the ladies’ room as fire consumed the dead-end corridor to the restrooms, the two young women had little chance of rescue. According to the NIST computer simulations, temperatures in that corridor topped 600°F, and its oxygen concentration dropped below 2 percent within a minute and a half of the fire’s ignition. Firemen with breathing apparatus arrived at The Station four minutes later. Long after the fire, when Richard Sanetti was permitted to retrieve his niece’s possessions from the medical examiner’s office, Bridget’s cell phone was among those personal effects. The last three numbers dialed by her were 911.
Back at the front windows of the bar, rescuers like Shamus Horan and Rick Sanetti labored long past the point where smoke and heat should have driven them away. To their horror, handfuls of hair and clothing were eventually all that could be extracted from the window openings. Sanetti describes one “very young man” who crawled to a window and reached up with a hand blackened from the heat. When the would-be helper reached for that hand, its skin came off and the victim’s red-hot wristwatch branded Sanetti’s palm. The young man was beyond saving.
Besides the three HJY interns on hand at The Station that night, there was a fourth Rhode Island College senior present, who by happenstance also majored in communications. Unlike the HJY crew, however, Jen Choquette wasn’t on an unpaid internship; she was at one of her multiple part-time jobs — bartending at The Station — which she worked to put herself through school. Jen had answered a want ad in the Providence Journal about a year and a half earlier. The interview and training process consisted of a backroom chat with Mike and Jeff Derderian at the club. No paperwork was completed — no employment application, no W-2. She’d be strictly paid “under the table . . . cash.” Training consisted of, “Here’s the bar, here’s the kitchen, here are the light switches and here’s the Fry-O-Lator oil.” She was never shown a fire extinguisher.
Choquette was soon opening the club on Thursdays and Saturdays at 4:30 p.m., closing it at 1 a.m., and cleaning up until 1:30. She would go directly from her college classes to the club on Thursday afternoon. For her labors, Jen received $40 cash per night, plus pooled bar tips. Tips had to be split with the “bar back,” who continuously stocked the bar’s coolers with beer and ice.
On the afternoon of the concert, Jen Choquette arrived at the club around quarter to four from a short day at school. She’d had “two huge exams that day,” had stayed up all night to prepare for them, and hadn’t eaten. Choquette was asleep on her feet from the moment she arrived. And from early on, she was slammed. At five feet, two inches tall, Jen could see only the first row of people against the bar, but she knew that the faster she made drinks, the more money she’d make. As soon as she’d serve one patron, another would take his place; and on it went. Sleep-deprived and food-starved, Choquette functioned on autopilot right up until Great White’s pyro lit up the club.
As Dr. Metal stood onstage hawking Budweiser, WHJY, and Great White, Jeff Derderian stood at the main bar alongside Choquette, counting out singles from the tip jar to replenish the cash registers, which were jammed with twenty-dollar bills. Derderian counted out twenties, put them in his pocket, or took them back to the office. This was the first time in Jen Choquette’s experience that the registers overflowed with twenties. It was a good thing, too, because Dan Biechele, Great White’s manager, was waiting to be paid.
Jen was still head down, making drinks, when Great White began to play. She was so tired that when people shouted “Fire!” she heard “Fight!” and kept on pouring, figuring the safest spot for her was behind the bar. Only after she saw flames near the ceiling of the far end of the club did she stop her work, marveling that the band played on. When Great White finally stopped playing, smoke had begun to reach the bar, and a crescendo of screams followed. Her mind raced. “I’m like, ‘Oh, God, I can’t leave the bar. I’m gonna get fired. I have money in here. I can’t leave it.’ I probably had, like, $600 so far in the pot.”
But as smoke and flame spread through the concert hall, Choquette’s sounder instincts took over. Placing one hand on the bar, she vaulted over it and bolted out the bar exit door in a single motion. Looking back on that instant, Jen recalls that “something lifted me up over the bar and threw me out the side door.” The absence of alternatives can have an immediate clearing effect on the mind. It certainly did so for Jen Choquette. Fortunately, at that moment she knew where the bar door was located.
Several people were able to escape through the unmarked and largely hidden kitchen door. Most were club employees, the only persons familiar with that exit. John Arpin and Paul Vanner were somehow able to traverse the entire length of the club, from stage to kitchen door, and exit uninjured. Scooter Stone made it from the light board; Julie Mellini from her back bar. They all knew where they were headed.
Using the kitchen door in the event of an emergency was something that Vanner had personally contemplated in the past. “If the shit ever hit the fan in this club, or if there’s fire or if there’s some idiot that whips out a machine gun and starts shooting people, or a riot or something, that exit is gonna have accessibility to it cause nobody knows about it,” he correctly predicted.
Shot girl Rena Gershelis wondered whether fire was part of the show — until waitress Dina DeMaio (seen tending the main bar in the pre-fire video sequence) told her, “I don’t think it’s part of the show. I’m out of here. You should leave.” Rather than head directly out, however, DeMaio walked toward the club’s office, possibly to grab her personal belongings. That brief detour proved fatal. When Gershelis stowed her shot tray and walked out the kitchen door, she assumed that Dina was right behind her. But Dina never followed.
Julie Mellini would not have left when she did had not Paul Vanner run by her and said, “Julie, get the hell out. Get the hell out now. This place is goin’ up.” Julie grabbed her cash register drawer and headed toward the kitchen door, telling people to “follow me.” Once outside, Mellini hurried around to the front of the club, hoping to find her best friend, Linda Fisher, who had been selling Great White merchandise in one corner of the atrium. In front of the building Julie found “piles of people trying to get over each other” out the front door. Before she could find Linda, however, Mellini met Jeff Derderian in front of the building. He told Julie to “help people,” then grabbed the cash drawer from her and disappeared behind the burning building. A cash register drawer was later found stashed in a snowbank behind the club.
One nonemployee who found his way out the kitchen door was Stephen Eldridge. When smoke and heat filled the club, he moved away from the fire, as instinct would suggest. However, he soon found himself in the back storeroom. Eldridge quickly scanned it. No door. No windows. Three other people in there. One was “Dr. Metal,” Mike Gonsalves. Eldridge knew he couldn’t stay there, so he pushed open one of the room’s swinging doors and took a lucky right turn in the smoky darkness. Finding himself a few feet from the open kitchen door, Eldridge simply stepped outside.
The next day, firefighters recovered ten bodies from within the storeroom. No survivor saw Dr. Metal after Eldridge.
A few patrons escaped despite an initial period of indecision. Harold “Hal” Panciera came to The Station that night with low expectations, and the place, “an overcrowded dump,” lived up to them. Panciera was thirty-five and coming off a rough stretch. Just three weeks out of rehab for cocaine addiction, he sat “stone cold sober” at the main horseshoe bar smoking cigarettes when Great White took the stage. He can be seen in Brian Butler’s early video walkthrough of the main bar, seated next to the Sanetti party.
Panciera had a clear sight-line to the stage from his perch at the bar, and he didn’t like what he saw. The moment flames began climbing the walls behind Great White, he “knew that people were going to die — the place was just that crowded.” Panciera initi
ally ducked behind the bar’s curve about ten feet from the exit door and waited for his buddy, who had gone to the men’s room. Before long, however, black smoke tumbled toward him across the ceiling. It fast became too thick to see anyone, but he “distinctly recalls hearing the bar cash register open.” Someone scooped the till. As heat in the room rose in seconds from tolerable to scalding, Panciera could hear, over the screams, people banging blindly on the walls, feeling for any door or window opening. Working his own way along the east wall of the club, he groped for the bar exit door until he “popped out” of it, into breathable air.
Once he became reoriented, Panciera returned to the bar door and yelled inside, but there was no response. He turned and walked twenty feet farther south to the kitchen door. It stood open and empty, flanked by snow piles. All who would exit through it on their own had long since left. Inside were only black smoke within a few feet of the floor and an eerie silence. When he yelled into the door, Panciera truly expected no response. But a man answered, “Help! I’m burning alive! I can’t get out!” Panciera knew he could not reenter through the dense smoke, so he yelled for the man to stay on the floor and tell him if he felt snow. Panciera then began throwing snowballs along the floor in a radial pattern. After several tosses, the man responded, “I feel it!” So, Panciera kept throwing snowballs in the man’s direction, instructing him to follow them. When the man crawled within feet of the kitchen door, Panciera reached inside and dragged him out.
Brian Butler’s video from outside the club more than five minutes into the conflagration clearly shows the five-foot-seven, 150-pound Panciera standing in the parking lot, staring toward arriving firetrucks and shouting, “Gimme a medic!” Over one shoulder, he carries a two-hundred-pound unconscious man. Behind him, flames belch from the club’s front doors. Beside him, a leather-vested club-goer holds a pitifully tiny fire extinguisher aloft in one hand. In the foreground, firemen drag an uncharged line past a blackened, still-smoking man who writhes on the pavement moaning, “Turn it on . . . turn it on.” And Dan Biechele scrambles to free that same fire hose from beneath a car tire. One can only surmise Biechele’s horror at what he had unwittingly set in motion.
Panciera never learned the identity of the man on his shoulder — the lucky one, who had escaped the inferno on a trail of snowballs. But the victim spoke with Panciera about his children after regaining consciousness and awaiting transport to a hospital. Panciera is sure the man survived.
CHAPTER 15
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH
WE SEE IT EVERY DAY, and there may be entirely too much of it for our liking, but by and large we know about as much about our skin as we do about our spleen. Sure, it’s probably important, but what our skin does, and how it does it, remains a mystery to most of us.
That is, until our skin is burned. Then, its complexity, regenerative powers, and critical role in our survival become all too apparent. We can live without a spleen. We can’t live without our skin.
The anonymous Station fire victim, seen writhing and smoking in the parking lot in the Butler video, was acutely aware of the necessity, and particular vulnerability, of his skin. One can only hope that his agony was caused by burns sufficiently superficial that his skin nerves were spared from destruction, thereby increasing his chances for a good recovery.
Had land mammals, including humans, not evolved from aquatic creatures, we might not need such complex, or sensitive, skin. Scales or shells fit the bill for most water-dwelling animals. However, scientists studying evolution tell us that the development of an envelope of skin was a crucial step in the adaptation of aquatic animals to a land environment, with its infinitely more variable hazards and opportunities.
And skin was an extraordinary evolutionary development. It is a complex organ — the largest in the body — that simultaneously protects its wearer from the environment as it allows him to interact with it. Hardly a static wrapper for our innards, skin is a dynamic, integrated arrangement of cells, tissues, and structures that performs a myriad of functions. It provides not only a physical barrier to heat and cold and against infectious microorganisms, but also a mechanism for regulation of body temperature; sensation (from exquisite to excruciating); protection from the sun’s rays; maintenance of the body’s fluid balance; wound repair and regeneration and — not least of all — shaping outward physical appearance. (Beauty’s skin-deep nature has long kept legions of dermatologists and cosmetologists in business.) All these critical functions may be lost when substantial areas of the skin are burned. As dozens of Station fire survivors would learn over time, which functions of the skin are lost, and which, if any, may be recovered, depend upon what regions of the skin are destroyed.
Our skin has three major interdependent functional regions. The outermost region, called the epidermis, serves as the body’s major barrier to vapor and fluid invasion. Without its protective envelope, we would be easy prey for water and airborne pathogens. Simple bathing would be suicidal, not to mention rather painful.
The epidermis itself consists of multiple layers. Its deepest is the basal layer in which epidermal cells begin their lives through division, later migrating toward the skin’s surface, where, in a genetically programmed process, they lose their nuclei and become, for reproductive purposes, dead. They form a cornified layer of flattened, adherent protective cells at the skin’s surface where they protect us like microscopic chain mail. About twenty-eight days after starting their journey from the epidermis’s basal layer, the outermost epidermal cells flake off, their work complete — cellular lemmings, as it were, giving their all for our health and safety.
Below the epidermis lies the dermis. The dermis makes up the majority of the skin and provides it with its pliability and tensile strength. Shot through with a matrix of connective tissue called collagen, the dermis also contains sensory receptors, hair follicles, blood vessels, lymphatic channels, and nerve networks. The dermis is also home to two types of sweat glands: the kind that empty directly onto the skin’s surface, and those that just ooze into hair follicles. Here, too, reside the microscopic structures critical to wound healing and regeneration. If the dermis is destroyed, as occurred with many Station fire victims, regeneration of skin is impossible; only grafting can provide necessary coverage.
The skin’s deepest region, the hypodermis, is involved in the synthesis and storage of fat. It insulates the body, serves as a reserve energy supply, and cushions the outer skin layers and allows for their mobility over underlying bony structures. The hypodermis also contributes to appearance — the beauty of booty — by molding body contours. Excessive fat development in this region is the bane of dieters and the meal ticket of liposuctionists.
When skin is burned, the body produces both local and systemic responses to the insult. One local response consists generally of skin cell and blood vessel destruction, resulting in a white or charred appearance. Another local response, which carries the risk of systemic involvement, is rapid bacterial overgrowth and infection of the wound area.
It is the burn itself that enables this rapid, and potentially widespread, infection. In daily life we share our skin’s surface with innumerable microbes, part of the normal bacterial “flora” on and in our bodies. Healthy immune and circulatory systems keep these free-riders from overpopulating. But when microcirculation and lymphatic structures within the skin are destroyed by heat, bacteria are allowed to multiply unchecked within devitalized (dead) tissues. In fact, when more than 40 percent of the body’s surface is burned, without aggressive intravenous antibiotics, infection will spread throughout the body, often resulting in death.
The major systemic result of serious burns is fluid imbalance. Our bodies regularly walk a hydration tightrope, achieving a precarious balance of fluid intake and output. Our digestive system, kidneys, and skin (through fluid retention and loss through sweating) play critical roles in keeping variances in hydration within tolerable limits. However, when large areas of flesh are burned, our capillaries leak
copious amounts of fluid. When the body sends more fluid to replace it, it is immediately lost. Worse yet, lost fluid may not be replaceable by drinking, due to paralysis of the digestive system, which occurs when more than 20 percent of the total body area is burned. The heart races to make up for loss in blood volume. Without intravenous fluid resuscitation, burn victims risk death from hypovolemic shock, when the heart is unable to pump enough blood to make up for the loss of fluids.
Prior to Boston’s 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire (the worst nightclub fire in U.S. history), the standard of care for initial burn treatment emphasized removing contaminants and devitalized tissue from the burn wound (“debridement”); unfortunately, many patients succumbed to hypovolemic shock during this horrifically painful process. However, the physician in charge of burn treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital at that time, Dr. Oliver Cope, was convinced that greater attention had to be paid to systemic fluid balance. As a result of his new treatment protocol, Cocoanut Grove survivors treated at Massachusetts General enjoyed better outcomes than their counterparts at Boston City Hospital. From that point onward, the standard of initial care for large burns would emphasize fluid resuscitation and infection control.
Human skin is pretty tough stuff. It can tolerate temperatures up to 104°F for hours before irreversible injury occurs. But above that temperature, depth of injury depends upon length of exposure. For example, a patron of The Station who stood upright in the club’s atrium ninety seconds after ignition of the polyurethane foam, exposing his head to scorching temperatures five feet above the floor, would have had less than two seconds before the skin on his face suffered irreversibly deep injury.
Killer Show Page 13