INFERNO AT GREAT WHITE CONCERT IN RHODE ISLAND CLAIMS NEARLY 100

After having a little while to absorb a lot of information about this tragedy from news outlets, and talking to numerous people in the music business who are in positions to make educated statements about an incident like this, you can almost be sure of a few things:

1. Jack Russell and the GREAT WHITE organization are screwed. There's no reason that a band playing for 300 people in a small club in Rhode Island needs to shoot off a 10 foot-tall sparkler on stage. It's not 1985, you haven't been nominated for a Grammy lately, and your ego didn't need a column of fire behind it on stage.

2. The owner of The Station is screwed. Even if he had NO idea the band was going to shoot off a pyro cannon, and he wasn't required by law to have sprinklers in this 60 year-old wooden building, he needed to make sure security was able to get people out of the building in the event of an emergency. Apparently, three out of the four exits in the building weren't even used.

3. The radio station that promoted the event, WHJY in Providence, RI, could be screwed for endorsing an event where a band was able to set fire to a vennue. The jock who emceed the event, Mike Gonzales, may have been one of the victims of this fire.

4. Almost a hundred people died as a result of other people's negligence. How soon do you think it's going to be before almost one hundred families file multi-million dollar lawsuits againts the band, the club, the radio station, the town and/or the state? Not long.

From MSNBC:
Forensic teams prepared to resume work early Saturday on identifying the remains of at least 96 people killed after a fireworks display staged at a rock concert triggered a raging inferno. Officials said that 187 people were injured, some critically, as panicked concertgoers rushed to escape Thursday night’s fire. The tragedy came four days after 21 people were killed during a stampede in a Chicago nightclub.

Governor Donald Carcieri said some of those who fled the fire at the Station Club told him Friday, “In 30 seconds if you weren’t out of that building, you didn’t have a prayer.”
“Why this happened, who was accountable, if any one individual was accountable, that will all unfold,” he said as he fended off reporters’ questions. The state fire marshal is conducting an investigation.
Fire Chief Charles Hall told reporters at the site Friday afternoon, “If there were sprinklers in this building, we would not be here right now.”
The one-story wood building, which was at least 60 years old, was not required to have a sprinkler system because it was “grandfathered” under a 1976 requirement.
The building did have a fire alarm and emergency lighting, which operated during the fire, according to Hall.
The fire chief attributed the deaths primarily to two factors. One was that “any pyrotechnics in the interior of a combustible building are unsafe.”
The second: Those attending the concert didn’t know where to find all of the building’s exits.
“The main concentration of victims was at the front door,” Hall said. “Many people who came to this concert last night, it was their first time at the Station Club. Being creatures of habit, people would have a tendency to try to get out the same way they came in, not being cognizant of the fact that we had three other operating fire exits.”
He said the club had a maximum legal occupancy of 300 and added, “There was slightly under that number in the building at the time of the fire.”
Earlier, Hall told NBC’s “Today” program that the club had recently passed a fire inspection but did not have a permit for fireworks.
The entire club was consumed by flames within three minutes, Hall said.
The band Great White had just started playing when giant sparklers on stage began shooting up and ignited soundproofing foam on a wall and the ceiling. The fire quickly spread over the crowd, filling the building with thick, black smoke.
Concertgoer Jack Rezendes of Jamestown confirmed that, saying he escaped by avoiding the front door.
“I saw everyone going to one spot to get out and I went around and broke out a window and climbed through it,” he said.
The blaze broke out about 11 p.m. at The Station in West Warwick, about 15 miles southwest of Providence.
Concertgoer John Schmidt told “Today” that many people were slow to evacuate because it initially looked as if the fire were part of the show.
A TV news crew inside the club doing a follow-up story to the Chicago fire filmed part of the tragedy before escaping. “People were trying to help others and people were smashing out windows, and people were pulling on people and nobody cared how many cuts they got, nobody cared about the bruises or the burns,” said WPRI-TV cameraman Brian Butler. “They just wanted out of the building.”
Butler kept his camera rolling as he rushed to the club’s front door; once outside, he ran around to the back, capturing thick black smoke and flames rolling through that exit. Michelle Malardo of Coventry, R.I., said people screamed and stomped on each other as they tried to squeeze through the club’s front door. “They were jumping all over each other and they were on fire,” Malardo said.
Robin Petrarca of Warwick said she was within 5 feet of the door, but the billowing smoke was so thick, she couldn’t see the exit. In the rush to escape, she fell and was trampled, but made it out moments later.
“I never knew a place could burn so fast,” she said. “There was nothing they could do, it went up so fast.”
Of the 187 people injured, 81 were admitted to hospitals in Rhode Island and Boston. Others were treated at the scene.
At Rhode Island Hospital, Dr. William Cioffi told “Today” that 19 victims were in critical condition and on life support. At least six others were in critical condition at other hospitals.
Firefighters worked to pull charred bodies from the building as onlookers watched — worried about missing friends.
“They were completely burned. They had pieces of flesh falling off them,” said Michelle Craine of West Warwick, who was waiting to hear about a friend who was missing. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
Jack Russell, the lead singer of Great White, said he noticed that some foam had caught fire and then tried unsuccessfully to douse it with a water bottle. No one appeared with a fire extinguisher, he said, and then all the lights went out. “I just couldn’t believe how fast it went up,” he said.
It was the second deadly U.S. club disaster in four days. Early Sunday, 21 people were killed and more than 50 injured during a stampede in a Chicago nightclub that began when a security guard used pepper spray to break up a fight.
The Rhode Island blaze was the deadliest U.S. fire since 87 people died at the Happy Land Social Club in New York in 1990, a fire authorities blamed on arson.

Here we go... the 'blame game' begins...The club owner seems to have the advantage at this point, because the club had passed a fire inspection not long before this happened, and was evidently up to code for this kind of event.
A lawyer representing club owners Michael and Jeffrey Derderian said the sparklers were used without permission from the club.
“No permission was ever requested by the band or its agents to use pyrotechnics at The Station, and no permission was ever given,” said Kathleen Hagerty.
Russell said his manager checked with the club before the show and the use of pyrotechnics was approved. Paul Woolnough, president of Great White’s management company, said tour manager Dan Biechele “always checks” with club officials before pyrotechnics are used.
“If there’s any issue at all, then it’s never used,” Woolnough said. Biechele could not immediately be located for comment.