Posted on 02/22/2003 1:42:53 AM PST by Dane
Blaze, smoke engulf victims within seconds
02/22/2003
BY JENNIFER LEVITZ and ZACHARY R. MIDER Journal Staff Writers
WEST WARWICK -- A fireworks display exploded into flames at a small-town nightclub, killing at least 96 people, injuring another 180, and turning a carefree night of rock 'n' roll into the worst disaster in Rhode Island since the Hurricane of 1938.
There were up to 360 people in The Station in West Warwick around 11 p.m. Thursday as the band, Great White, launched into its first song, "Desert Moon." Pyrotechnics ignited on the back of the stage.
Within 20 seconds, the club caught fire. Some concertgoers thought it was part of the show, raising their bottles and pumping their fists. But the walls and ceilings were ablaze.
Brian Butler, a television cameraman from East Providence's Channel 12, was videotaping the concert. His video shows that flames ignited some soundproofing material on the sides of the stage and quickly spread.
"As soon as the pyrotechnics went off, we knew there was a problem," said Edward Pezzelli, a sales manager from Coventry. But at first, he said, the relatively calm crowd filed toward the exits. "Up until the lights went off," he said. "That's when everything turned into a total panic."
Thick black smoke billowed across the room, blinding patrons who could not see the illuminated exit signs. As the frightened crowd rushed toward doorways and windows, some fell, and others trampled over them. Many escaped by bursting through windows or the glass "greenhouse" section in the front of the building, suffering cuts. Others fled into the bathrooms, which offered no escape.
John Arpin, of West Warwick, was working as a club bouncer. He ran toward the kitchen, about 30 yards from the stage, in hopes of finding a fire extinguisher. By the time he returned, less than a minute later, "this black smoke engulfed me. You couldn't see."
Arpin said he escaped out a back door while his girlfriend, Paula Gould, "crawled out the front window." Arpin said Gould was in critical condition at Rhode Island Hospital.
Matthew Smith, 25, of Cranston, a construction worker, was in front of the stage, near a speaker.
"They set off the firecracker salute. The back wall caught on fire. We thought it was part of the show. It took 10 seconds, and half of the whole building went up in flames. I had flames touching my ears."
"There [was] a bunch of screams. If you ever saw a soccer game where they were trampling each other, that's what it was."
Karen and Paul Gordon, of Coventry, were sitting in the side bar when Paul began yelling, "Come on! Let's go!"
"I saw fire," Karen Gordon, 37, said yesterday. "It was like a tin can going up. It caught in seconds."
The fire alarm sounded, darkness fell and the crowd began looking for a way out.
"People were trampling me. They were pushing and shoving. I was screaming, 'Get off of me! Get off of me!' " said Karen Gordon. "I fell. My husband grabbed me. He pulled me up by the jacket."
Kerrie Amato, of Warwick, said "It was like a sparkly firework. It went off sideways. People were jumping through windows. People were trampled. And people were trying to jump over the people that were trampled."
She was unharmed, but a friend -- Michael Perreault, 30, of Coventry -- suffered burns.
Mitch Schapiro, the lead singer and guitar player of Trip, one of the opening bands, was on his bus when the fire broke out. "By the time we got outside," he said, "it just took my breath away. The stench was just terrible."
He made his way toward the club, he said, but he was unable to budge the pile of bodies he found there. "They were so buried in the front door, you couldn't pull them out."
He said he saw people unconscious from the thick smoke, lying on top of conscious people who were struggling to break free.
John DiMeo, who had escaped from the nightclub, yesterday described the deaths as screams that had suddenly gone quiet. "It's a sound you never want to hear."
FACED WITH the fourth-deadliest nightclub fire in U.S. history, New England's rescue personnel mobilized with ambulances lined up outside the bar like taxi cabs, filling 15 medical centers, and airlifting the seriously burned to Massachusetts General Hospital.
Firefighters got the call at 11:05. Gregory Tameleo, who lives in the neighborhood, saw the blaze and reached it just moments after it began. By then, rescuers were already pulling people from the building. "I was watching bodies getting wheeled out by me," he said. "I saw some charcoal-black skin bubbling."
West Warwick Fire Chief Charles D. Hall said that he estimated that firefighters were able to save more than 100 people by pulling them from the burning structure.
At the time of the fire, state Rep. Peter Ginaitt was the rescue captain on duty at Warwick's Station 5, on Cowesett Road about two miles east of the club.
"We hadn't crossed over Quaker Lane yet and the smoke was so thick you could cut it, and I said to my driver, 'We're in for it.' We went down the street and came upon a security guard on the road with a burned woman, probably about a block away. We quickly put her in the rescue and I told my driver I had to go ahead to assess [other victims].
"The onslaught in the parking lot of the Cowesett Inn was something I had never seen," Ginaitt said. "It was like Night of the Living Dead. "Every person I walked up to, I thought, my God, this is the worst, let me treat them, and it was only a matter of walking to the next person to see someone worse. "
Many victims, he said, "were found randomly walking through the woods, walking through the parking lots, and we feared some of them might succumb to their injuries and just lie down between the cars at Knight's Garage."
Firefighters rushed to the aid of victims who were jammed in the club's doorway and windows.
"We had firefighters that had some injuries from pulling people out of there," Ginaitt said. "There was one individual that was pulled from underneath a whole bunch of dead bodies."
Firefighters went into the building to search for survivors and put water on the fire, but soon a general alarm went up ordering them to evacuate.
"The general call to evacuate was moments before the roof caved in," he said. "They were just trying to find people. You could hear cries."
One man writhed beneath a blanket, on the ground in front of the Cowesett Inn as he waited for medical assistance.
As a woman being brought out on a stretcher from the inn arched her back and gasped for air, a firefighter told her, "Calm down for us. You have to calm down."
The Rev. Robert Marciano, of St. Rose & Clement Church in Warwick, a chaplain for the Warwick Fire Department, would make the sign of the cross over bodies and quickly say a prayer, asking the Lord to receive them.
Fire officials set up a triage center at the Cowesett Inn, evaluating and treating 164 people there. A half-dozen nurses appeared at the scene to help, and the firefighters started sending them patients who needed emergency treatment and a comforting word or touch until an ambulance could take them.
More than 60 rescue vehicles from nearly every community in Rhode Island and many Massachusetts towns converged on Cowesett Avenue. Nearly all the state's ambulances were employed to shuttle the hundreds of victims to hospitals.
Ambulances were leaving with as many as three and four patients aboard; a bus normally used to transport Warwick Fire Department trainees carried 16 of the "walking wounded" to South County Hospital.
Ginaitt, a registered nurse, said he feared some of the most badly burned survivors would not make it.
"When their faces are fully burned that means they've taken in superheated gases and have actually singed the surface of their lungs. There's a high rate of infection that develops, a swelling in the lungs that will occur in the next 24 hours. Those inhalation burns of 1,200-degree heat is something you can't just put gauze on and treat superficially."
By 2 a.m., the ambulances had stopped. Hearses began pulling up instead.
As those who had survived the blaze left or were driven to the hospital, a new crowd gathered, a crowd that waited and watched in the frigid cold for signs of loved ones. Lisa Silva, of West Warwick, was looking for her uncle, Thomas "Tutu" Medeiros, also a resident of the town. She knew he had gone to the club, and now he was missing. "You know Tutu, the hero, he probably tried to save half the people," Silva said with watery eyes.
THROUGHOUT THE DAY yesterday, each agonizing report of more dead was crushing to families who clutched pictures of their loved ones as they searched for answers at fire departments, hospitals, and even at the skeleton of the nightclub -- where the parking lot was still filled with cars of people who had gone in for a good time and had never come out.
Michael Ferreira, of Fall River, was asking for his stepbrother, who loves live bands and bangs on drums when he can. He found Robert Barlow, 28, clinging to life at Rhode Island Hospital.
Outside Hasbro Children's Hospital, Patricia Belanger was still looking:
"This is my daughter," she said, crying as she waved a picture. "She was a waitress there. It was her birthday yesterday. . . We've called all over." She pleaded, can you put her face on television?
Great White guitarist Ty Longley was missing. "We were able to get out but we can't find our guitar player," said bassist Dave Filice.
The street in front of the club yesterday morning was littered with discarded shirts, packs of cigarettes, and the purple disposable gloves of rescuers. Blood stained the snow nearby.
By 7 a.m., there were 39 confirmed dead. "The firefighters are holding up as well as can be expected," Chief Hall said.
After the last patients were trucked to hospitals, the triage center was no longer needed. The Red Cross set up a grief counseling and information center at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Warwick.
Some people were still going to the local firehouses.
"There were family members coming in and asking for the whereabouts of their loved ones," Ginaitt, the Warwick rescue captain, said. "You look through the list and you know damn right well they're not on it, so you direct [the family] to a holding room, and ultimately down to the Crowne Plaza, all the while hoping you were wrong, that you missed the name on the list. And ten minutes later the same thing happens again."
One woman was standing in the parking lot with her denim suit splashed and smeared with the blood of a man whose name she never learned. "He collapsed in the parking lot," said the woman, Nicole Conant, of Medford, Mass. "I was just trying to assist."
By later yesterday morning, rescue vehicles were slowly being replaced by television news crews. But at the still-smoking ruins of The Station, the work of recovering bodies had only begun. The firefighters brought in heavy equipment to dig through the ruins for pockets of corpses. Each pocket discovered would mean another hike in the death toll, which grew to 50, then 65, then 86, before settling at 96 late yesterday.
THE QUESTIONS began right away. Why was there a fireworks display? Were there other exits? West Warwick Fire Chief Hall said most people rushed the front door because that was the way they had come in. There were three other exits.
Amid the recovery, 50 federal, state, and local investigators quickly descended onto this Rhode Island town, to begin a criminal investigation of the fire. The finger-pointing had begun, with scrutiny of nightclub codes and the pyrotechnics display. The singer for Great White said he had been given permission to set off pyrotechnics. The owners of the bar, which does not have a license for such fireworks, denied giving permission. A veteran Rhode Island investigator, who watched bodies being pulled yesterday, called the deaths, "potential homicides."
Governor Carcieri came home from a vacation in Florida yesterday morning. "I've lived here my whole life," said Carcieri, 60. "And I don't recall anything like this in our state's history."
The hurricane on Sept. 21, 1938, killed 262 people in Rhode Island.
Asked in a news conference yesterday evening how the staggering loss of life could have been avoided, Chief Hall took a long pause before answering.
"Probably without the use of pyrotechnics," he said finally.
The Station was known for hosting local rock bands and, now and then, an '80s band such as Quiet Riot or Union, made of former members of Kiss and Motley Crue.
Great White, a heavy-metal band whose heyday was in the '80s, drew a big crowd at The Station before, and did again Thursday. The Station had been advertising heavily for the event, hosted by well-known Rhode Island DJ Mike Goncalves -- "Dr. Metal" -- who would be among those missing and feared dead.
INVESTIGATORS SAID yesterday that fireworks used during the band's first number quickly ignited the roof and walls of the crowded club. And as the authorities tried to determine who, if anyone, was culpable for the blaze, attention turned to the conditions under which Great White was allowed to ignite the display.
Jack Russell, lead singer of the band, said his group had supplied and used the pyrotechnics with the explicit permission of The Station management.
"We bring the pyrotechnics," Russell said in an interview outside the triage center. He described the props he used as "gerbs," tubular objects that release sparks into the air. "Basically, it's like a sparkler."
But the club's owners, brothers Michael and Jeffrey Derderian, contend that the fireworks were set up and ignited without their knowledge or permission. Their lawyer said yesterday, "At no time did either owner have prior knowledge that pyrotechnics were going to be used by the band Great White. No permission was ever requested by the band or its agents to use pyrotechnics at The Station, and no permission was ever given."
Jeffrey Derderian, a reporter for Channel 12, was in the club at the time the fire broke out, and assisted in helping to evacuate the building during the fast-moving fire, according to his lawyer. Derderian was interviewed by state and local authorities. The brothers have owned The Station since March 2000.
Club owners in New Jersey, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida yesterday said Great White had used pyrotechnics in their clubs without permission. On Feb. 14, an employee at The Stone Pony, in Asbury Park, N.J., briefly stopped Great White's show after the band used the special effects, owner Domenic Santana said yesterday.
"After the show, we read them the riot act and told them that was totally uncool and they put us in a precarious position and put the safety of our patrons on the line without telling us," Santana said. "They told us 'no big deal,' that these are just sparklers and they don't hurt anybody."
Despite the start of the investigation into the tragedy yesterday, Carcieri said the top priority was, "getting these people identified for the families." Connecticut and Massachusetts have sent help for the Rhode Island state medical examiner, and the effort to identify the victims will continue nonstop, Carcieri said.
This effort became a statewide one.
Some volunteers wore uniforms and some wore street clothes, but all the workers at the Rhode Island Emergency Management's family assistance center wore expressions of concern as they took phone calls from people looking for loved ones.
Volunteers at the Cranston Armory attempted to give comfort and information to callers from all over the country.
One volunteer counselor, Doris Kushner, of Cranston, took an estimated 50 calls during a four-hour shift. One of the most difficult calls came from a distraught young woman from Connecticut who knew her mother had been at the club for a girls' night out.
"She was hysterical," Kushner said. "She said, 'My mother couldn't have gotten out. She had a walker.' "
Part of the beauty of Rhode Island is its small size, Carcieri said. Everybody seems to know everybody. "We will find at the end of the day that there are few people who aren't personally touched by this," he said.
Among the missing is John Longiaru, 23, of Johnston. His father, John, who is a planner in the town's Recreation Department, said his son went to the club with his girlfriend, who escaped.
Longiaru said he watched television yesterday morning and then went to the Red Cross center in Warwick to file the paperwork for his son. "It's wait and see," he said.
The White House was among the many to send a letter of condolence to Rhode Island.
Late last night, Carcieri spoke briefly about the investigation, saying officials had found evidence of other pyrotechnic devices stored at the club but could not say who it might belong to.
He also said the dead had reached 96. He said seven bodies were positively identified and matched with families, and that another eight should be positively identified soon. The rest will take time because of the condition of the bodies. The Associated Press reported last night that 35 of the more than 180 injured patrons were in critical condition.
Through Sen. Jack Reed, the federal Disaster Medical Assistance Team has been activated and will send five teams of pathologists to Rhode Island today. The pathologists will work around the clock to identify victims.
By 6:30 p.m., a tent had been erected in front of the mound of rubble and one remaining fragment of what had been The Station. One of the only parts of the club left was a wall decorated with a hand-painted mural of Ozzy Osbourne.
Working by 9,000-volt floodlights, the searchers raked, shoveled and sifted through the debris for remains, personal belongings -- rings, wallets, clothing, or other victim identifiers -- and clues to the fire that in minutes snuffed out so many lives.
With reports from Mark Arsenault, Linda Borg, Gerald M. Carbone, Andrew C. Helman, Bob Jagolinzer, Alex Kuffner, Scott Mayerowitz, Mike McKinney, Amanda Milkovits, Tom Mooney, Susan Kushner Resnick, Meaghan Wims, and Karen Lee Ziner.
Great White Death
When the thread started last night on FR, the estimate was 10 to 20 dead.
Criminal indifference.
It was the foam or sound insulation that ignited and from there it was a tinderbox. The video is quite startling.
Don't these stupid, insipid anchors have a clue about anything?!!!
Victim: "Like punching your lights out, man!"
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