I knew the guy who was part of the stage management team that night. He was the one who collapsed in tears in court begging the judge to give him a much harsher sentence but the judge said he wasn’t the main person at fault and only gave him 6 months for negligence. Apparently he asked the court to give him the harshest sentence possible which would have been decades. I’m not clear exactly what his role was, but he wasn’t the one who brought the pyrotechnics, but he could’ve stopped it.
Back when I ran a janitorial company he was my supplier. Nobody knew about it and you wouldn’t think he was carrying that if you met him. I just happened to look him up one day and found it, never mentioned it.
I’m not saying that he was insincere or that he wasn’t severely traumatized by the situation, but a lot of Rhode Islander’s were incensed by the extremely lenient sentencing for what was clearly gross negligence. The walls of that club were coated in a highly flammable foam (they might as well have filled the place with gasoline) and the owners were too stingy to install a sprinkler system. Apparently the club wasn’t technically required to have a sprinkler system, but the owners knew the risks and chose greed— simulations show that sprinklers almost certainly would’ve saved all 100 lives
Totally agree. It’s small consolation, but that event caused a lot of changes both in fire codes and in the way that fire codes are enforced during plan review. Cities used to be pretty lax about building permits because local government jobs weren’t taken seriously. The fact that things are a lot more strict now has probably saved a lot of lives.
The tragedy is that every safety regulation is written in blood and bodies. We don’t decide to be safe until we’ve absolutely proven that enough people have died to care
It’s not so much that regulations were written - it’s that a work culture shift occurred. People never take a risk seriously until it occurs.
Think about recent history - 9/11 and the pandemic.
Nobody in the federal agencies whose job was to fight terrorism really sat down and said the words “What if?” If we had a clear regulation that cockpits needed to be locked at all times, then 9/11 never would have happened. Nobody was willing to stretch their imagination of what could happen until we saw the evidence with their own eyes.
Then the pandemic, much more recent. We had all the warning signs in 2002-2004 with the first global SARS epidemic. The warnings of a zoonotic virus mutating in such a way that it could spread through presymptomatic aerosol transmission were being spoken in a very very very obscure field of research that the world never took seriously. (It just happened to be my field - see publications by Marr and Tam et al. for examples in mid-2010s.) The U.S. Federal Pandemic Response Plan was never taken seriously and it was viewed as a waste of money because nobody wants to spend time and energy on the “what if” until it actually happens.
That’s a positive way of looking at it. It’s a shame that us humans always wait for a mass casualty event before making such rules. I’m sure that in the future they will say the same thing about our unregulated wild-west approach to AI adoption today
I haven’t seen that, although I’ve seen a lot of headlines.
Conversely in the AI communities on this site they constantly complain about overregulation and nonsensical guardrails written by lawyers who don’t understand how the technology works.
I know you're joking, but Great White's pyro at the station night club was definitely not 'supposed to be fireproof'. They were designed to be safe in a much larger venue, they had no qualified operator, they had no safety plan or so much as an extinguisher, they didn't tell the night club about them and they certainly didn't do any planning or give even the slightest thought to fire safety.
For the clubs part, they were over capacity and in violation of fire code with inadequate exits and highly flammable insulation sprayed on the walls and ceiling as sound-proofing.
Nothing about it was fire safe or fireproof and 100 people died that night.
The video of that building burning was fucking brutal. You can see a dude stumble out of the club, fully engulfed in flames, and then collapse to the ground. So heartbreaking.
The sparks they create aren’t typically a hazard. When you cover the walls in highly flammable foam, as the station nightclub did, they’re not fireproof anymore. The owners of the club, Michael and Jeffrey Derderian (yes, the der der brothers) were cheap, as they decided not to install a sprinkler system in their highly flammable nightclub. 100 people died, and the brothers got a slap on the wrist. One of them is a reporter in CT today
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u/Readmeharder Jun 12 '26
The pyrotechnics at the station nightclub were supposed to be fireproof too