FIREFIGHTERS ARRIVED AT The Station five minutes after the fire had started, stunned to see that somehow the building was already fully engulfed.
It should not have been possible in the United States in the twenty-first century.
Horrific fires were remarkably common in America’s earlier days, especially after the Industrial Revolution. Among the most infamous that firefighters studied was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City in 1911, which killed 146 garment workers, many jumping to their deaths from ten stories. Tragedies of that scale were not supposed to happen anymore, especially since fire codes were upgraded nationwide in the 1970s. Yet here it was happening again, in their small town. Firefighters watched as people emerged from the nightclub, some walking while covered in flames. Later, many of the rescue workers would suffer from severe psychological trauma, and some would never talk about what they witnessed.
Captain John Gregson of the North Providence Fire Department stood ten feet from firefighters battling the flames. Like so many nearby cities and towns, his department raced to West Warwick when the call went out for help and arrived in an unfathomable sea of mayhem. Gregson’s job was to wait by the front door of the club with another rescue worker and a stretcher, so any survivors could be moved to nearby ambulances. The captain remembered the details of that night years later for “The Station,” a documentary by David Bettencourt.
Instead of survivors, there were bodies. Firefighters used ropes flung into the entrance of the burning building to lasso victims from a pile and pull them out. A protocol was established: if there was no movement or breathing, the person was considered “not viable” and the corpse was taken to a makeshift morgue nearby, a tarp spread out on the icy ground. Concertgoers’ cars were parked close to the building, so Gregson used the gurney to get victims to the hood of a car, pushed and pulled the bodies across, and then dragged them the rest of the way to the tarp. In the bitter cold, warm flesh steamed in night air.
“Is that a breath?” he said to his colleague. More than once Gregson momentarily wondered if a survivor had been placed on the tarp by mistake. Many looked nearly intact, not badly injured, at least on the outside. It was wishful thinking. It was only condensation, not a gasp of life.
As another victim was pulled out, a young man walked by and looked alarmed. “It moved,” he said.
“No, it didn’t,” Gregson responded. Later he would realize that he had never before referred to a fellow human being as an “it.” The person’s injuries were so severe it was impossible to determine gender. One arm was badly burned, and a hand was missing. The fire had burned away all the hair, down to the skull, and the person’s ears were gone.
As the two men argued over whether the body moved, the person’s head raised up and let out a desperate shriek to let everyone know: I’m alive!
Oh, God, Gregson thought.
Gregson and the other rescuer got the survivor to their truck, and realized they couldn’t get out. The massive response to the fire had them surrounded and trapped by other rescue vehicles. “We’re not going anywhere,” his colleague said.
The men went to work in the vehicle, injecting the patient with medications to stabilize. When they cut off the person’s clothing, a hand went up, as if trying to cover oneself in modesty. A woman? Fingers grasped Gregson’s hand, and he realized the person was conscious and aware of what was happening. Incredible, he thought, that the brain had survived the intense heat that had destroyed the body. Then there was the smoke that must have been inhaled, and the burns. This person should not be alive.
Gregson held the woman’s hand. Her face was turned down and he knew that she couldn’t see him, but he wanted her to know that he was with her. Gregson prayed, but not for the woman’s survival. As heinous as it was to contemplate, the best thing for this soul was to leave this body.
“I was praying that someone wasn’t going to make it,” Gregson later said. “I remember that feeling of just looking at the totality of this young woman’s injuries and the fact that modern medicine is where it’s at, the potential of her surviving this was greater than I had wanted it to be. I know that sounds terrible but she needed to be comfortable. We needed to be there. She needed to be out of there ten or fifteen minutes sooner, or we needed to be there five minutes later.”
Gregson’s prayer was eventually answered. Linda Dee Suffoletto, forty-three years old from Glocester, Rhode Island, a revenue officer for the state Department of Labor and Training who had worked a full-time job and a part-time job in order to put herself through Johnson & Wales University, was pronounced dead at 5:17 a.m. on Friday, February 28, a week after the fire, at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Linda was at first a “Jane Doe” in the hospital, since she was burned beyond recognition, and her identity was only confirmed with her jewelry and boot. Her husband Ben, an architect, also perished in the blaze, leaving behind their teenage son Zack, still in high school.
“I had never prayed like that before. It’s a hard thing to swallow. It’s not something that you usually do,” Gregson later said about wishing that God would spare the woman agony and take her life. “My faith has wandered. I have a hard time now thinking of God and heaven.”