Notwithstanding Dr. Laposata’s apparent reluctance to view dead bodies in situ, she found employment in 2010 as medical adviser to a television show, Body of Proof, about a crime-solving female medical examiner. Her job entailed advising makeup artists on how to depict gruesome injuries.
West Warwick town building official Stephen Murray, who last inspected The Station just two months before it burned, was fired one day short of the fire’s fifth anniversary. According to the Providence Journal, the town council’s unanimous vote to terminate him on February 19, 2008, took “less than two minutes,” with “no discussion” and “no rebuttal.” Better late than never, one would suppose.
West Warwick fire chief Charles D. Hall (“Our inspector missed nothing. They were in compliance.”) retired from his job in January 2008, to manage a fire and rescue squad at the state airport.
Even more complex retirement plans were carried out by Denis Larocque, the West Warwick fire marshal who overlooked flammable foam on The Station’s walls during multiple inspections, and increased the club’s permitted capacity from 258 to 317, then to 404, at the request of Michael Derderian. In 2005, Larocque voluntarily left the fire marshal’s job and returned to actual firefighting, remaining a battalion chief in the West Warwick Fire Department. About that lateral move, Chief Hall gushed, “[Larocque] was doing a good job where he was, and he’ll do a good job where he is.” (Hall did not elaborate on what might constitute doing a bad job of fire inspection in West Warwick.)
Then, in mid-2006, Larocque began a period of absence from his job for a “job-related injury.” Eighteen months later, he applied for a permanent disability pension, which, under his union contract, would pay him two-thirds of his salary for life, tax-free, with proportional future increases as active firefighters’ salaries rose. The contract also provided that grant of his disability pension could not be challenged, because Larocque had been out on disability for eighteen continuous months. “After 18 months, there’s nothing the Pension Board can do to disallow a disability pension. It becomes automatic,” explained the chairman of West Warwick’s pension board, Geoffrey Rousselle. According to Rousselle, the responsibility for monitoring Larocque’s medical condition during his eighteen months on disability, to determine whether he was actually disabled, fell to the town manager and the fire chief — Wolfgang Bauer and Charles Hall.
Barry Warner, the American Foam Corporation salesman and next-door neighbor of the club, left his job at American Foam more than a year before the fire. His house can be seen through a thin stand of trees, just behind the oval of one hundred tilting crosses at 211 Cowesett Avenue. It’s hard to say whether Warner’s property was previously more devalued by a loud rock club next door or, presently, by the quarter-acre of makeshift memorials to horror.
Warner’s grim front-yard tableau brings to mind the U.S. government’s acquisition of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s homestead in Arlington, Virginia, for use as a national cemetery during the Civil War. In August of 1864, the Union buried twenty-six bodies along the edge of Mrs. Lee’s rose garden, in close proximity to the mansion, “rendering it undesirable as a future residence or homestead.” Thousands more followed, along with a tomb for unknown Civil War dead, right in the rose garden itself. The Lees never returned to their family home.
On any given day, several people stop by the site of the Station fire. The loudest sound is the soft crunch of their footfalls in the gravel bordering the one hundred victim memorials. Visitors speak in respectful, hushed tones.
Barry Warner still owns the house directly behind the Station site. And, in one small, completely unintended way, he has gotten his wish.
It is very, very quiet there now.
EPILOGUE
CHANGE WAS INEVITABLE FOR THE VICTIMS of the Station fire. The tragedy left some physically scarred, but mentally strong. Others, who were spared serious physical injury, remain ravaged by post-traumatic stress syndrome. Specific individuals’ resilience in the aftermath of the event has been completely unpredictable. Many have bounced back, but for others the fire remains the single defining event of their lives.
Linda Fisher, who made her escape through an atrium window of the club, underwent multiple surgeries in the months and years after the fire. Her arms bear deep burn scars, but she wears them like a badge of courage. Sleeveless tops and motorcycle leathers remain part of her wardrobe. Linda has not let her injuries slow her down or diminish her self-esteem. Divorce and remarriage followed the fire, but so did a new house and a new life.
Harold Panciera, who appears on the Brian Butler video with an unconscious man over his shoulder, now sells oceanfront real estate in Narragansett, Rhode Island. He still looks like he could hoist a two-hundred-pounder on his back — when he’s not building custom motorcycles, his new post-fire avocation.
Gina Russo, who with her boyfriend Fred Crisostomi was turned away from the band door by a Station bouncer, still bears the physical scars of her ordeal. But she’s back to work as a medical secretary and performs volunteer work for the Phoenix Society, a national support group for burn victims. Her recovery was facilitated by a new love in her life. Gina and he were married in 2007.
Shamus Horan, who pulled multiple victims to safety through the club’s windows, still pursues his hobby of off-road four-wheeling (in vehicles he’s modified himself) when not working as a union pipefitter. Construction jobs like his have been hard hit by the recession. But Horan and his wife continue to count their blessings. She, too, escaped The Station’s flames. They married not long after the fire.
Peter Ginaitt, the registered nurse / rescue captain who codirected the successful triage and transportation of 188 victims on the night of the fire, retired from the Warwick Fire Department and took a position as director of emergency preparedness for the state’s largest hospital network. He left his elected position of state representative in 2007. It’s not known whether Ginaitt will run for higher office in the future, but if he does, he’ll certainly be a lock for those 188 votes.
Mickey Mikutowicz, whose squirreling of discarded polyethylene foam blocks from 1996 enabled the Station fire victims to recover an additional $25 million dollars in settlement from Sealed Air Corporation, continues to ply his landscaping and snowboard instructor trades by day. By night, his tribute band, Believer, still appears at New England clubs, where Mickey’s uncanny resemblance to Ozzy Osbourne puts him in good stead.
Gina Gauvin, the breeder of pet reptiles, was released from an acute-care hospital to a rehabilitation hospital two months after the fire. She had spent the first six weeks after the fire in a medically induced coma. When Gina finally emerged from the Rehabilitation Hospital of Rhode Island in late July 2003, she was horrifically scarred, but her spirit was clearly unbroken. Surgeons had constructed a rudimentary thumb and fingers from the remainder of her right hand. Her left hand was amputated at mid-forearm. Fortunately, Gina’s bright-red hair remains so thick that she can brush it over the skin-grafted areas covering half her scalp.
Gina’s children are now ten years older, and she is a recent grandmother. She lives independently and still cares for her beloved lizards. Born left-handed, Gina now paints with her right hand. Life will never be the same for her. But she is very grateful for that life. “I’m one of the lucky ones,” Gauvin observes.
My need to write about the fire, and its human and legal aftermath, became apparent when the criminal and civil actions resolved without trials, leaving the public clamoring for “answers.” I knew that most of the answers were contained in public records. However, the sheer volume of those records made marshaling the evidence daunting for any but the most committed researcher. To use an unfortunate phrase in the context of this case, making sense of it all was like trying to drink from a fire hose. Having worked on the legal aspects of the case, however, I had a framework for organizing that surfeit of information into a comprehensible work. At least, that was my objective.
The mere telling (or retelling) of inte
resting stories, however, is not a very lofty goal if no useful lessons can be drawn from them. A tragedy like the Station fire should, if nothing else, force us to examine how we conduct our lives and businesses. Work on the case, and the book, certainly caused me to do so.
I came to realize that every day we make unconscious calculations, balancing the risks of our actions against their potential benefits. Sometimes we incur risk on our own behalf, reaping the benefits, or suffering the consequences, personally. At least that’s what we tell ourselves.
But, as often as not, the equation is skewed. Potential benefit is all ours (a saved minute or two in travel, a saved dollar or two in safety precautions not taken), but the risk falls disproportionately upon others. In such situations, it’s easy for us to take risks.
I believe that our risk/benefit calculating is rarely done on a conscious level. It is often born of habit — habitual speeding; habitual corruption; habitually running a business “on the cheap” so as to eke out every last dime of profit. Only when disaster strikes, and others take the fall, do we ever stop to do the math.
Legal scholars, like the famous Judge Learned Hand, have attempted to describe reasonable conduct as that in which the societal benefit of an activity is greater than its risk. But risk to whom? And judged at what point in time? Hindsight may be 20/20, but is it fair to view the acts and omissions of players in the Station fire tragedy in this way? I would suggest that it is eminently fair, and a necessary exercise, lest history repeat itself.
It’s often said that disasters of the scope of the Station fire do not occur because just one thing is done wrong; rather, they are usually the result of many mistakes. That was certainly true here. The fire was a result of multiple tragic acts, the absence of any one of which would have avoided the tragedy. My list of causative blunders is a long one, and can, no doubt, be supplemented:
illegal use of pyrotechnics, unsuited to the venue, by unlicensed personnel
improper use of foam plastic insulation as sound insulation on interior walls
overcrowding of the club allowed by owners
absence of safety devices such as automatic sprinklers
lack of training for club employees
issuance of inflated maximum building occupancies by fire inspector
nonenforcement of fire codes by inspectors
design of entranceway with pinch point inhibiting rapid egress
manufacturers’ failure to warn of their products’ foreseeable misuse
promoters’ failure to observe hazards presented by the Great White tour in previous appearances
Every one of the above failures was motivated, at least in part, by greed. Whether the selling of cheap pyrotechnic spectacle by Great White, or the wringing of every last buck from a run-down bar by the Derderians, it all came down to money. And, when each player made his unconscious calculation to sacrifice others’ safety for profit or convenience, tragedy ensued, necessitating the yet more ghoulish arithmetic of the civil justice system.
I was struck, though, and strangely encouraged by a corollary of the above calculus. That is, that just one person or corporation doing the right thing can make all the difference in a given situation. At The Station, it could have been Fire Marshal Larocque citing the flammable foam on the club’s walls, or Great White forgoing illegal pyro. More generally, one club owner’s installing sprinklers instead of a larger sound system; one manufacturer’s clearly warning of its product’s dangerous properties, instead of hiding behind dubious test results — just one person acting reasonably, rather than greedily, can often avoid catastrophe.
Events after the fire, however, were disheartening, demonstrating that we can be woefully slow learners in these matters. Less than two years after the Station fire, the Cromagnon Republic nightclub in Argentina went up in flames when pyrotechnics ignited furnishings, killing 175 young people. Then, in January 2009, sixty-one New Year’s revelers lost their lives in a Bangkok nightclub after fireworks ignited its ceiling. Most were crushed near the club’s front doors. In December of that same year, a fire in a Russian nightclub, also ignited by pyrotechnics, killed 109 people. Overcrowding, poor exits, and indoor fireworks all played roles in these tragedies; yet no one bothered to learn from mistakes of the past.
It was even more discouraging to learn that corporations appear to have short institutional memories. A current Google search of “soundproofing foam” yields several websites that still brag of their plastic foam’s “testing Class A-1, non-flammable, under ASTM E84,” the notorious Steiner tunnel test, which was the subject of the 1974 FTC consent agreement with the Society of Foam Plastics Industries. That agreement stressed that the Steiner tunnel test does not accurately predict the flammability or flame spread of foam plastics “in actual fire conditions.” Under the agreement, the plastic foam manufacturers agreed not to use terms like “non-burning” or “self-extinguishing,” based on the test. So, why are sellers in 2010 still calling their foam products “non-flammable” under that discredited test? I would guess that if you asked their management about the 1974 consent agreement, they’d have not the slightest idea what you were talking about.
When it comes to protecting the public from dangerous products, the answer cannot lie exclusively in government regulation. Rather, the civil justice system must provide a necessary backstop and sharp reminder that manufacturers will be held accountable when defectively labeled or misleadingly sold products cause tragic events.
I hope that the evidence marshaled in this book will help readers form their own answers to questions left open when the criminal and civil cases settled. However, as I’ve discussed the case with friends over the years, they often ask, “Well, what do you think really happened?” To the extent that any reader cares about my answer, I would offer the following purely personal opinions. In so doing, I’ll summarize the evidence on which I rely. Again, they’re only my personal opinions, and other persons — especially the participants themselves — may strenuously disagree.
One of the first questions to arise after the fire was whether The Station’s owners gave Great White permission to use pyrotechnics. (The question itself is potentially misleading, because a literally true negative answer does not end the relevant inquiry.) The key evidence bearing on this issue is that the band’s tour manager, Dan Biechele, immediately explained to investigators how he and Mike Derderian had discussed pyro in a phone conversation to “advance” the Station gig. Biechele’s day sheet for the venue, seized from his computer right after the fire, read, “Pyro: Yes,” consistent with permission having been given in that phone call. At other venues on Great White’s tour, where permission was denied, pyro wasn’t used.
More important, the overwhelming weight of the evidence is that the Derderians and their employees had long permitted pyro to be used by other bands at The Station. In fact, Dan Biechele had personally shot pyro there with W.A.S.P. just two years earlier. Even if permission for Great White to use pyro on the night of the fire was not explicit, then it was at least implicit from past practice at the club. That the club’s owners historically tolerated and even encouraged pyrotechnics at The Station cannot be refuted. It appears on several videotapes. Perhaps most surprising is that a pyrotechnic-sparked fire did not happen there years earlier.
Another central question in the tragedy was whether Denis Larocque had a good-faith basis in the state fire code for increasing the club’s capacity to over four hundred at the request of Michael Derderian. Its answer can probably be found in Larocque’s designating the entire building as “standing room” when state law explicitly limits that designation to “only that part of a building directly accessible to doors for hasty exit.” In my opinion, the fire marshal’s unprecedented use of the standing-room designation for the entire building could not possibly have been undertaken “in good faith,” as I understand the term.
The same may be said for Larocque’s failure to “notice” nine hundred square feet of flammable egg-crate poly
urethane foam covering the west end of the club, including the very door that he cited on multiple occasions for opening inward. Larocque would have had to reach through a hole in the foam in order to open that door. By my interpretation of the phrase “good-faith effort,” his repeatedly overlooking the foam cannot possibly measure up.
But why did Larocque cite other, less significant, code violations, while he let the “solid gasoline” on the walls slide? I would suggest that he might have done so because the other violations were all correctable without shutting down the club’s core business: loud music. The Derderians probably saw that foam, which had been purchased through next-door homeowner Barry Warner, as their key to neighborhood peace (and, thus, the club’s continued operation). The foam simply had to stay — at any cost. (An even simpler explanation would be that Larocque’s citing relatively minor violations, while he let the deadly foam pass, made it look like he was doing his job in at least some respect.) We’ll never know all the reasons Larocque ignored the foam. His grand jury testimony is certainly of no help.
Another question posed after the tragedy was, “Why did so few people make use of the band door exit?” Two pieces of evidence shaped my belief in this regard. First, several witnesses credibly recount how, during the critical first minute of their ninety-second escape window, one or more club bouncers turned them away from that door, insisting that it was “for the band only.” Second, and equally important, was the natural disinclination of club patrons to head toward the flames on the club’s west wall, which quickly spread over and around the band door. This in itself may provide an explanation for Jeff Rader’s mysterious photo, in which he appears frozen in the face of an impossible choice: join the immovable crowd facing the club’s front doors, or turn toward the flames behind him.
When I oversaw testing of the polyurethane and polyethylene foams at the Western Fire Center in 2008, my instinct to escape from the source of radiant heat was overwhelming. Within the first minute of each burn of a foam-covered room corner, I was literally driven back several feet from the area of the hood calorimeter by the heat flux. I tried to imagine myself on the dance floor or in the atrium area of the club on the night of the fire, and whether I would have been able, first, to appreciate that escape from the club’s front doors was impossible (very difficult to perceive from that location), and, second, to head toward the source of the intense radiant heat to exit through the band door. In retrospect, it is small surprise that so few patrons were able to do so.
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