Station Nightclub Fire Remembered in Films

On Feb. 20, 2003, a devastating fire broke out in a Rhode Island rock club, The Station, killing 100 people and injuring 230.

Ten years on, YouTube is releasing a series of films commemorating the dreadful sequence of events that night. The first film was made available Wednesday — on the 10th anniversary of the blaze.

The first film shows Gina Russo telling her harrowing story of the blaze and her recovery. Russo suffered third- and fourth-degree burns and was in a medically induced coma for 11 weeks.

In the film, she says someone kept her and her partner from escaping the fire in its early stages.

Fred just grabbed my hand, and we went over to the fire exit. We got to the fire exit, and there was a bouncer standing in front of the door. Fred was screaming, “There’s a fire. Open the door.” And the bouncer just stood there and said no, the door was for the band only, and that it was club policy.

The majority of those who tried to leave the club tried to use the same door they had used to enter. That night, the club held 462 people (though it was licensed to hold only 404), and a stampede prevented many people from escaping, including Russo and her partner.

Fred’s hand was on my back at one point, and all I remember is him pushing me and screaming, “Go.” And when I tried to turn around to find him, all I [saw] were a sea of people, and their heads were on fire. It was melting black rain.

The Station fire was caused by pyrotechnics that ignited flammable foam behind the stage. The National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that sprinklers would have controlled the initial stages of the fire.

Experiments conducted at NIST in a reconstruction of the platform area fire demonstrated that a water sprinkler system installed in the test room… was able to control the fire initiated in non-fire retarded polyurethane foam panels and to maintain survivable conditions at head height in the test room for the duration (over five minutes) of the experiment.

This video shows the NIST’s computer simulation of what would have happened if sprinklers had been installed.

Some reports say that sprinklers should have been installed, because the building was reclassified after the enactment of regulations requiring them, but the NIST report disputes this.

More films to be released
New episodes of The Station will be released every week, with interviews with sound engineers, news reporters, NFPA fire investigators, and Rhode Island’s former attorney general.

The tagline of the series is “Learn. Remember. Heal.”

This is particularly poignant in the aftermath of last month’s fire at the Kiss Nightclub in Brazil that killed more than 230 people.