The Station: One Hundred Lives

On the night of February twentieth, two thousand three, a fire at a nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island, killed one hundred people in less than six minutes. The Station fire remains the fourth deadliest nightclub fire in American history, and the disaster it triggered left a mark on building codes and fire safety law across the entire country.

The club was a converted ranch house on Cowesett Avenue that had been operating as a concert venue for years. That Thursday night, the rock band Great White was headlining. The crowd numbered around four hundred and sixty, well above the club's posted capacity of four hundred. At seven minutes past eleven, Great White's tour manager Daniel Biechele ignited a set of pyrotechnic sparkler devices at the edges of the stage, the kind of effect the band used at nearly every show.

The sparks reached the walls flanking the stage, which had been lined with polyurethane foam, a material sold for soundproofing but highly flammable and completely unprotected by any fireproofing treatment. Within nine seconds, visible flames were climbing the walls. Within one minute, the foam was sending a black toxic smoke across the ceiling at chest height. Most of the hundred people who died were overcome by that smoke before they could reach an exit. The main entrance became a fatal bottleneck as hundreds of people all moved the same direction at once.

The building had no fire sprinkler system. Local and state fire inspectors had been in the club the prior year without flagging the foam. No one had approved the pyrotechnics for that venue.

In the criminal cases that followed, Biechele pleaded guilty to one hundred counts of involuntary manslaughter and served less than two years before parole. The club's owners, Jeffrey and Michael Derderian, pleaded no contest. Michael served time; Jeffrey received community service.

The legal aftermath reshaped law far beyond Rhode Island. Massachusetts enacted mandatory sprinkler requirements for entertainment venues. Rhode Island followed. Across the country, fire marshals initiated audits of clubs and concert halls, and the foam industry faced new scrutiny over how its most flammable products were being sold and installed.

Station Fire Memorial Park opened in May of two thousand seventeen on the site where the building once stood. One hundred empty chairs, one for each person who did not walk out.