Free Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire by John Barylick Page B

Larocque to further sharpen his pencil and see if he could increase the club’s capacity to 400 for big concerts. Larocque accomplished this and more, raising the building’s limit to 404 occupants “when all tables and chairs are removed from all areas,” so long as a uniformed firefighter was privately hired by the club for all such events. (Nowhere does the fire code allow for relaxation of its limits when firefighters are present.) This time his calculation allowed only five square feet per person by designating the entire building as standing room . This was the physical equivalent of fitting 404 people onto half the surface of a high-school basketball court.
    The fire code relied upon by Larocque defines “standing room” as “only that part of the building directly accessible to doors for hasty exit,” such as a restaurant lobby or a ticket line where customers stand only temporarily. According to William F. Howe, the chief of inspections for the Rhode Island State Fire Marshal’s Office, the code does not permit an entire building to be classified as standing room.
    And, yet, that’s where Sandy and Michael Hoogasian found themselves,waiting for Great White to go on — in a sea of standing-room revelers so thick that movement was nearly impossible. They, and everyone else with a sightline to the stage, would have to remain where they were until the show finished.
    Some Station patrons, uncomfortable with the density of the crowd on the dance floor, managed to position themselves along the club’s south wall, on a raised area normally occupied by tables and chairs. Kimberly and Stephanie Napolitano, thirty-year-old twins from North Providence, were among those on the platform with their backs pressed against the wall. They couldn’t help but notice a strange substance covering that wall from wainscoting to ceiling — corrugated egg-crate-type plastic foam, spray-painted black with flecks of glitter thrown into the paint. The foam ran the length of the south wall, then spread over the entire proscenium arch of the west stage wall, lining the drummer’s alcove and continuing to the right of the stage, across an inward-swinging door with a sign that read: KEEP DOOR CLOSED AT ALL TIMES . The stuff even ran up one sloped ceiling pitch above the dance floor — nine hundred square feet in all. This unusual material was the single dominant feature of the performance space — seemingly impossible to be overlooked. And yet it was.
    The state fire code requires decorative and acoustical materials on nightclub walls to be flame resistant. It forbids materials “of a highly flammable character” and specifies that the fire inspector conduct a simple “match flame test” on a sample if he has any doubt about a material’s flammability. Under that test protocol, flame may not spread more than four inches up a vertically held eight-inch strip for twelve seconds after a match is applied to its lower edge. Also, “materials which drip flaming particles shall be rejected if they continue to burn after they reach the floor.”
    Had the match flame test been applied to the kind of foam behind the Napolitano twins, flame would have consumed the entire eight-inch strip in four seconds, leaving nothing but a burning puddle of a napalm-like substance beneath it.
    An earlier attempt at sound insulation did, however, catch the attention of Denis Larocque. In March 2000, when the Derderians were purchasing the club, the fire inspector insisted on removal of a black curtain covering the walls of the drummer’s alcove; this, because the club lacked proof of its flame resistance.
    The Derderians installed the gray egg-crate foam in July 2000. The first West Warwick fire inspection thereafter was performed by John Pieczarek,the department’s director of communications, in November 2000. It was done in conjunction with the club’s annual liquor license renewal. Pieczarek’s report makes no mention of the foam covering the