Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (20 page)

Several people were able to escape through the unmarked and largely hidden kitchen door. Most were club employees, the only persons familiar with that exit. John Arpin and Paul Vanner were somehow able to traverse the entire length of the club, from stage to kitchen door, and exit uninjured. Scooter Stone made it from the light board; Julie Mellini from her back bar. They all knew where they were headed.

Using the kitchen door in the event of an emergency was something that Vanner had personally contemplated in the past. “If the shit ever hit the fan in this club, or if there’s fire or if there’s some idiot that whips out a machine gun and starts shooting people, or a riot or something, that exit is gonna have accessibility to it cause nobody knows about it,” he correctly predicted.

Shot girl Rena Gershelis wondered whether fire was part of the show — until waitress Dina DeMaio (seen tending the main bar in the pre-fire video sequence) told her, “I don’t think it’s part of the show. I’m out of here. You should leave.” Rather than head directly out, however, DeMaio walked toward the club’s office, possibly to grab her personal belongings. That brief detour proved fatal. When Gershelis stowed her shot tray and walked out the kitchen door, she assumed that Dina was right behind her. But Dina never followed.

Julie Mellini would not have left when she did had not Paul Vanner run by
her and said, “Julie, get the hell out. Get the hell out now. This place is goin’ up.” Julie grabbed her cash register drawer and headed toward the kitchen door, telling people to “follow me.” Once outside, Mellini hurried around to the front of the club, hoping to find her best friend, Linda Fisher, who had been selling Great White merchandise in one corner of the atrium. In front of the building Julie found “piles of people trying to get over each other” out the front door. Before she could find Linda, however, Mellini met Jeff Derderian in front of the building. He told Julie to “help people,” then grabbed the cash drawer from her and disappeared behind the burning building. A cash register drawer was later found stashed in a snowbank behind the club.

One nonemployee who found his way out the kitchen door was Stephen Eldridge. When smoke and heat filled the club, he moved away from the fire, as instinct would suggest. However, he soon found himself in the back storeroom. Eldridge quickly scanned it. No door. No windows. Three other people in there. One was “Dr. Metal,” Mike Gonsalves. Eldridge knew he couldn’t stay there, so he pushed open one of the room’s swinging doors and took a lucky right turn in the smoky darkness. Finding himself a few feet from the open kitchen door, Eldridge simply stepped outside.

The next day, firefighters recovered ten bodies from within the storeroom. No survivor saw Dr. Metal after Eldridge.

A few patrons escaped despite an initial period of indecision. Harold “Hal” Panciera came to The Station that night with low expectations, and the place, “an overcrowded dump,” lived up to them. Panciera was thirty-five and coming off a rough stretch. Just three weeks out of rehab for cocaine addiction, he sat “stone cold sober” at the main horseshoe bar smoking cigarettes when Great White took the stage. He can be seen in Brian Butler’s early video walkthrough of the main bar, seated next to the Sanetti party.

Panciera had a clear sight-line to the stage from his perch at the bar, and he didn’t like what he saw. The moment flames began climbing the walls behind Great White, he “knew that people were going to die — the place was just that crowded.” Panciera initially ducked behind the bar’s curve about ten feet from the exit door and waited for his buddy, who had gone to the men’s room. Before long, however, black smoke tumbled toward him across the ceiling. It fast became too thick to see anyone, but he “distinctly recalls hearing the bar cash register open.” Someone scooped the till. As heat in the
room rose in seconds from tolerable to scalding, Panciera could hear, over the screams, people banging blindly on the walls, feeling for any door or window opening. Working his own way along the east wall of the club, he groped for the bar exit door until he “popped out” of it, into breathable air.

Once he became reoriented, Panciera returned to the bar door and yelled inside, but there was no response. He turned and walked twenty feet farther south to the kitchen door. It stood open and empty, flanked by snow piles. All who would exit through it on their own had long since left. Inside were only black smoke within a few feet of the floor and an eerie silence. When he yelled into the door, Panciera truly expected no response. But a man answered, “Help! I’m burning alive! I can’t get out!” Panciera knew he could not reenter through the dense smoke, so he yelled for the man to stay on the floor and tell him if he felt snow. Panciera then began throwing snowballs along the floor in a radial pattern. After several tosses, the man responded, “I feel it!” So, Panciera kept throwing snowballs in the man’s direction, instructing him to follow them. When the man crawled within feet of the kitchen door, Panciera reached inside and dragged him out.

Brian Butler’s video from outside the club more than five minutes into the conflagration clearly shows the five-foot-seven, 150-pound Panciera standing in the parking lot, staring toward arriving firetrucks and shouting, “Gimme a medic!” Over one shoulder, he carries a two-hundred-pound unconscious man. Behind him, flames belch from the club’s front doors. Beside him, a leather-vested club-goer holds a pitifully tiny fire extinguisher aloft in one hand. In the foreground, firemen drag an uncharged line past a blackened, still-smoking man who writhes on the pavement moaning, “Turn it on . . . turn it on.” And Dan Biechele scrambles to free that same fire hose from beneath a car tire. One can only surmise Biechele’s horror at what he had unwittingly set in motion.

Panciera never learned the identity of the man on his shoulder — the lucky one, who had escaped the inferno on a trail of snowballs. But the victim spoke with Panciera about his children after regaining consciousness and awaiting transport to a hospital. Panciera is sure the man survived.

CHAPTER 15

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

WE SEE IT EVERY DAY,
and there may be entirely too much of it for our liking, but by and large we know about as much about our skin as we do about our spleen. Sure, it’s probably important, but what our skin does, and how it does it, remains a mystery to most of us.

That is, until our skin is burned. Then, its complexity, regenerative powers, and critical role in our survival become all too apparent. We can live without a spleen. We can’t live without our skin.

The anonymous Station fire victim, seen writhing and smoking in the parking lot in the Butler video, was acutely aware of the necessity, and particular vulnerability, of his skin. One can only hope that his agony was caused by burns sufficiently superficial that his skin nerves were spared from destruction, thereby increasing his chances for a good recovery.

Had land mammals, including humans, not evolved from aquatic creatures, we might not need such complex, or sensitive, skin. Scales or shells fit the bill for most water-dwelling animals. However, scientists studying evolution tell us that the development of an envelope of skin was a crucial step in the adaptation of aquatic animals to a land environment, with its infinitely more variable hazards and opportunities.

And skin was an extraordinary evolutionary development. It is a complex organ — the largest in the body — that simultaneously protects its wearer from the environment as it allows him to interact with it. Hardly a static wrapper for our innards, skin is a dynamic, integrated arrangement of cells, tissues, and structures that performs a myriad of functions. It provides not only a physical barrier to heat and cold and against infectious microorganisms, but also a mechanism for regulation of body temperature; sensation (from exquisite to excruciating); protection from the sun’s rays; maintenance of the body’s fluid balance; wound repair and regeneration and — not least of
all — shaping outward physical appearance. (Beauty’s skin-deep nature has long kept legions of dermatologists and cosmetologists in business.) All these critical functions may be lost when substantial areas of the skin are burned. As dozens of Station fire survivors would learn over time, which functions of the skin are lost, and which, if any, may be recovered, depend upon what regions of the skin are destroyed.

Our skin has three major interdependent functional regions. The outermost region, called the epidermis, serves as the body’s major barrier to vapor and fluid invasion. Without its protective envelope, we would be easy prey for water and airborne pathogens. Simple bathing would be suicidal, not to mention rather painful.

The epidermis itself consists of multiple layers. Its deepest is the basal layer in which epidermal cells begin their lives through division, later migrating toward the skin’s surface, where, in a genetically programmed process, they lose their nuclei and become, for reproductive purposes, dead. They form a cornified layer of flattened, adherent protective cells at the skin’s surface where they protect us like microscopic chain mail. About twenty-eight days after starting their journey from the epidermis’s basal layer, the outermost epidermal cells flake off, their work complete — cellular lemmings, as it were, giving their all for our health and safety.

Below the epidermis lies the dermis. The dermis makes up the majority of the skin and provides it with its pliability and tensile strength. Shot through with a matrix of connective tissue called collagen, the dermis also contains sensory receptors, hair follicles, blood vessels, lymphatic channels, and nerve networks. The dermis is also home to two types of sweat glands: the kind that empty directly onto the skin’s surface, and those that just ooze into hair follicles. Here, too, reside the microscopic structures critical to wound healing and regeneration. If the dermis is destroyed, as occurred with many Station fire victims, regeneration of skin is impossible; only grafting can provide necessary coverage.

The skin’s deepest region, the hypodermis, is involved in the synthesis and storage of fat. It insulates the body, serves as a reserve energy supply, and cushions the outer skin layers and allows for their mobility over underlying bony structures. The hypodermis also contributes to appearance — the beauty of booty — by molding body contours. Excessive fat development in this region is the bane of dieters and the meal ticket of liposuctionists.

When skin is burned, the body produces both local and systemic responses to the insult. One local response consists generally of skin cell and blood vessel destruction, resulting in a white or charred appearance. Another local
response, which carries the risk of systemic involvement, is rapid bacterial overgrowth and infection of the wound area.

It is the burn itself that enables this rapid, and potentially widespread, infection. In daily life we share our skin’s surface with innumerable microbes, part of the normal bacterial “flora” on and in our bodies. Healthy immune and circulatory systems keep these free-riders from overpopulating. But when microcirculation and lymphatic structures within the skin are destroyed by heat, bacteria are allowed to multiply unchecked within devitalized (dead) tissues. In fact, when more than 40 percent of the body’s surface is burned, without aggressive intravenous antibiotics, infection will spread throughout the body, often resulting in death.