Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (17 page)

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 Tshirts 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 his 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 O
₂
. 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 possible.

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.

The sequence of a room fire is terrifying in its predictability. In its beginning stage, flames are localized in the first fuel ignited — in the case of The Station, the polyurethane foam on the walls of the drummer’s alcove. The room still has normal oxygen content (fire hasn’t won the contest yet), and overall temperatures have not begun to rise (witness Great White onstage, still slamming power chords while flames develop behind them). Convection carries byproducts of combustion to the upper part of the room, in this case the peaked ceiling area above The Station’s stage, as it draws oxygen in at the bottom of the flames.