WHEN THE DEATH toll reached one hundred, The Station secured its place in infamy.
Yet the nightclub disaster was not the deadliest fire in Rhode Island history. During the Cold War, on May 26, 1954, a weapon malfunction on the aircraft carrier USS Bennington caused an explosion that set the ship ablaze as it entered Narragansett Bay for its homeport of Quonset Point. One hundred and three were killed and more than two hundred injured.
A deadly military accident, however, was not considered the same as a building fire. Service members face a certain level of risk, but civilians in a public setting have an expectation of safety. The lessons learned by Americans over the years about the dangers of fire have come at a terrible price, and seem predictable and preventable in hindsight.
The deadliest fire in United States history was a massive forest fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, that claimed as many as 2,500 lives, although it has been mostly forgotten since it happened on the same day, October 8, 1871, as the Great Chicago Fire, which killed about three hundred.
Chicago was also home to the nation’s deadliest single building fire with the Iroquois Theatre disaster on December 30, 1903. Sparks from a light ignited a curtain during a Sunday matinee performance of the popular Drury Lane musical Mr. Blue Beard. The theater was filled to capacity, with more jammed in for standing room, for an estimated crowd of nearly 2,200, many of them children. The fire spread from the curtain to highly flammable painted canvas scenery, and with only one effective exit, a massive grand staircase, at least 602 people perished when they could not escape. The number of fatalities might actually be higher, since bodies were possibly removed before the count was completed.
Despite the tragedy of the Iroquois, the lesson of having enough exits and avoiding flammable interiors was not learned.
In 1942 Cocoanut Grove of Boston became the nation’s deadliest nightclub fire as 492 people were killed and 166 injured when combustible decorations caught fire. Within five minutes much of the club was consumed in flames and black smoke. An estimated 1,000 people had crammed into a space rated for 460, and could not escape. Many headed for the main entrance, but it was a single revolving door that quickly became jammed and broken. Other exits had been bolted shut to prevent patrons from leaving without paying. Doors that were unlocked were designed to open inward, making them useless against the crush of a stampede desperate to get out. In the aftermath firefighters found several dead guests still sitting in their seats with drinks in their hands, apparently so instantly overcome by toxic smoke they didn’t have time to move.
After Cocoanut Grove, new fire safety codes became law. For example, it became a requirement that revolving doors be flanked by hinged doors. Capacity rules were better defined and fire prevention was generally improved.
Then on May 28, 1977, came the fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate, Kentucky, just outside Cincinnati. One hundred and sixty-five people died and more than two hundred were hurt when they flocked to see singer John Davidson in a cabaret room that could safely accommodate six hundred, but was packed with as many as 1,300. A smoldering fire caused by faulty wiring in the drop ceiling of an adjacent room burst into a flashover and quickly spread. Patrons could not evacuate in time to save their lives. The building, which had been added to with piecemeal construction over many years, did not have a sprinkler system. One victim lingered and died nine months after the fire.
Litigation followed the Beverly Hills Supper Club disaster and became a class action lawsuit, one of the first major cases pursued this way. Victims and their families won $43 million in settlements.
Nearly 7,400 Americans died in fires that same year, but the numbers of fire fatalities began to drop incrementally in the aftermath of the Beverly Hills Supper Club, and had averaged about 3,200 fire deaths per year at the time of The Station disaster.
Mass disasters weren’t completely finished, however, and sporadic horrific fires grabbed headlines. On November 21, 1980, an electrical fire that spread due to a lack of sprinklers created toxic smoke and fumes and led to the deaths of eighty-five people at the MGM Grand Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. The Happy Land social club fire in the Bronx on March 25, 1990, killed eighty-seven people when a disgruntled ex-boyfriend sought revenge on his former girlfriend who worked at the club and set it ablaze by pouring gasoline at the entrance to trap people inside. The club was unlicensed and had no fire alarm or sprinklers. The case is considered the deadliest mass murder by a single person in United States history.
These extreme cases aside, it remains a stubborn fact that more than three thousand Americans die each year in fires, a number that has remained consistent, even as medical breakthroughs save more burn victims from death, and billions have been spent on fire prevention and response.
There are several theories for why so many lives continue to be lost.
One involves the United States legal system. Most deadly fires have been unintentional—they were not purposely set to harm others. But in the safety culture that developed after tragedies like the Beverly Hills Supper Club, another trend emerged: the criminalization of accidents. Even though a criminal conviction often depends on the “intent” of the accused, thinking has evolved to hold those criminally responsible for violating safety rules, even if there was no intention to hurt others.
As a result, when a tragedy happens, the parties involved often turn to attorneys for protection, rather than being immediately fully transparent with investigators and authorities, fearful that any information they would honestly provide could be manipulated to create a criminal charge, rather than be used to determine the cause of an accident to prevent something similar from happening again.
It’s a situation that some experts fear played out with deadly consequences in 2018 and 2019 with the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max jets. An equipment malfunction contributed to the first crash of a Lion Air flight in October 2018 in Indonesia, killing 189 people. The equipment issue, which some in Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration apparently suspected, did not become public until after a second crash with Ethiopian Airlines in March 2019 claimed 157 lives. Had all parties been immediately transparent after the first crash, some believe the second tragedy would not have happened.
Criminalizing accidents, which in theory might hold people accountable and force others to follow safety rules, could actually have the unintended consequence of thwarting timely investigations.
“Criminalizing error erodes independent safety investigations, it promotes fear rather than mindfulness in people practicing safety-critical work, it makes organizations more careful in creating a paper trail, not more careful in doing their work, it discourages people from shouldering safety-critical, caring jobs such as nursing, and it cultivates professional secrecy, evasion, and self-protection,” concluded safety expert Sidney Dekker, professor at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and founder of the Safety Science Innovation Lab.
In the case of The Station fire, the remark within hours of the fire by the West Warwick police chief that the club owners would “most definitely” face criminal charges led the Derderian brothers to almost immediately limit their cooperation with the government, even though the brothers had key information about events that caused the fire.
For some in the government, seeing the disaster as a crime was more important than anything else. Little remained of the foam from the nightclub’s walls after the fire, and Attorney General Patrick Lynch fought to keep that evidence for his criminal case, spurning federal investigators tasked with testing the foam to determine the fire’s cause to prevent similar disasters. “All due respect, but to me there’s nothing more important than the criminal investigation. And so we hold precedent, and we are the law,” Lynch said. “So then, when you have these national organizations come in, and they want to test it for their report. I’m like, ‘Really? You don’t really matter to us. So stand by, we’ll get back to you when we can. Or you can work off the work that we’re doing.’”
In addition to this infighting over what best protects public safety—timely investigations versus effective prosecutions—there are other theories about why fire remains so deadly in the United States. For one, people are not sufficiently fearful of fire. Americans are more than a hundred years beyond the time when using fire was routine. People heated their homes with fireplaces, and cooked over open flames, and that proximity taught them the danger. In the modern world, people see fires when they’re decorative in hotel or restaurant fireplaces.
At The Station, patrons watched the walls ignite from the fireworks and momentarily thought the flames were part of the act. Considering the number of rock shows that use fire as a special effect, this was understandable. However, that delay of up to thirty seconds to comprehend the danger cost precious time. Too few had noted the locations of the club’s different exits when they arrived, so when the crowd realized the fire was out of control, two-thirds of those inside raced toward the one door they were familiar with, the entrance, and only about 40 percent would make it out that way. Those who survived rerouted and discovered other exits or escaped through smashed windows.
The speed of the nightclub fire was alarmingly fast because it was fueled by highly flammable foam on the walls, but fire spreads more quickly than people appreciate. Fifteen years after The Station disaster, the deadly wildfires of California were pushed by fifty-mile-per-hour winds, allowing the flames to move faster than human beings can run. Many residents had no idea fire could spread so quickly, and dozens perished.
“They don’t understand its power,” said Joe Kinan, the worst-burned survivor of The Station.