QUINCY, Mass. -- Pointing to safety problems caused by greedy club owners, coupled with patrons intoxicated by liquor and drugs and confused by loud music and poor lighting, a national panel of fire experts yesterday recommended the strictest safety rules ever for nightclubs and concert venues across the country.
The panel overwhelmingly agreed that every new nightclub serving 50 or more patrons be protected by fire sprinklers.
Existing clubs serving 100 or more patrons would also be required to have sprinklers.
The fire experts also voted to mandate extra safety inspections for any club offering standing room for 250 or more patrons and trained crowd managers for any club serving 50 or more patrons.
The recommendations were made during a daylong meeting of the National Fire Protection Association's Technical Committee on Assembly Occupancies.
They are stricter than the Rhode Island fire code changes Governor Carcieri signed into law Monday and stricter than other national code changes that had previously been rejected by two other NFPA committees.
All the changes were prompted by The Station fire in West Warwick in February, which killed 100 people and injured more than 200, as well as the crowd incident that crushed 21 people in a Chicago nightclub just days earlier.
Several members of the NFPA committee reported that they stopped in West Warwick on the way to yesterday's meeting in Quincy to look at the fire site, which is steadily becoming a memorial, and that reinforced their intentions to toughen safety rules for clubs.
"I, too, went to the site. I was totally amazed at the occupancy. It wasn't big," said Ronald R. Farr, deputy fire chief of Kalamazoo, Mich. "I don't know what the conditions were inside. But certainly there were conditions that altered people's ability to get out and sprinklers would have improved people's ability to survive. There's no doubt people want sprinklers. We need to protect them."
The NFPA sets national standards that state and local governments are free to adopt as their own. Throughout yesterday's session, the fire marshals, fire chiefs, consultants and industry experts praised the state of Rhode Island for the tough new fire codes it enacted and cited The Station fire for the lessons it taught.
John W. Pritchett, of the Athens-Clarke County Fire Department in Athens, Ga., said there are about 100 bars in his college town and the owners routinely block exits with banners and other obstacles. When you add the influence of alcohol on patrons, he said, "half of them can't find their way to the restrooms, let alone out the exits."
Several experts also said that the criminal investigation of the fire headed by the Rhode Island attorney general's office was bottling up a lot of critical information that would help determine what more could be done in terms of exits and the need for sprinklers.
It's still not generally known why victims piled up in the front doorway, what percentage of the patrons tried to exit through the front doors or where people died.
Ed Rother, of HOK Sport in Kansas City, a leading designer of sports stadiums and arenas, said he visited The Station site and was told that barriers blocked patron's egress, but he wanted more details.
Jake Pauls, a crowd consultant from Maryland, said "I would be happier if someone could say what actually happened at The Station. What happened with that flow [of patrons]?
"My hypothesis, and it's only that: I think there was something else happening at the front door. You had a ramp to the right, and stairs to the left. Another possiblity is that there was something at the door, such as a step down, that could have caused one or two people to stumble."
(The Journal also has run into roadblocks from state officials as the newspaper investigates the nightclub disaster. The attorney general has rejected the newspaper's request for records that would show where within the ruins of The Station the bodies of fire victims were found.
(In a letter July 1 to The Journal's lawyer, the attorney general's office cited exemptions in the state's Access to Public Records Act that allow authorites to withhold investigatory records if making them public "could reasonably be expected to interfere with investigations," "would deprive a person of a right to a fair trial," would constitute an invasion of personal privacy, or would disclose investigatory techniques. The letter also said the public interest in releasing the records to the newspaper is outweighed by privacy interests.")
Gary S. Keith, vice president for building codes and standards with the NFPA, said during the meeting, "We don't have access to a lot of information because of the grand jury proceedings. But there's enough out there already to tell us something about the speed of the fire and certain egress issues. If more information becomes public later, we can go back and review these codes."
Early in the meeting, it seemed doubtful any decisive action would be taken.
As chairman Ralph Gerdes said, the NFPA's "voting record isn't very impressive at this point."
In recent balloting of the committee, only two of seven proposed safety changes won the necessary three-fourths vote. Another NFPA committee that correlates various code changes had voted down all seven proposals.
All the votes are merely advisory. Next week, the NFPA's Standards Council meets in Portland, Ore., for secret balloting on the measures. Gerdes said no one can predict what the council will do.
One committee member, Jim Messersmith, of the Portland Cement Association, in Virginia, voted against every code improvement yesterday and questioned the rush to action.
"We are here because of two incidents," Messersmith said. "Now we want to put sprinklers everywhere. It's a free-for-all. What were the overall losses?"
His comments seemed to stir other members to take even more aggressive steps.
"It's not just these two incidents," said crowd expert Paul Wertheimer, of Chicago. "These are historic problems. The fact that two occurred in one week doesn't mean it's just an occasional problem."
He added that damages from just The Station fire are expected to top $1 billion. "The cost in human suffering and tragedy, who can mesaure that?"
"If this is a knee-jerk reaction, we have slow reflexes because these kinds of incidents have been going on for years," said Wesley W. Hayes Jr., chief of Polk County Fire Services in Florida.
John Lake, chief of the Marion County Fire Rescue, in Ocala, Fla., said he sees enforcement problems across the country because fire protection bureaus have been cut back so severely. The only way to compensate for lack of enforcement is to require better safety measures, he said.
"I can tell you they are going to hang that fire inspector in Rhode Island, but it won't bring those people back," he said. "You've got to mandate designs."
"Speaking from the enforcement side, and being a person who has carried bodies out of buildings, one life is too many," said Steven W. Peavey, of the Altamonte Springs Fire Department in Florida.
"If we don't [lower the sprinkler threshold] to 50 now, five years from now there will be a club with 100 people in it, they're going to die and people are going to ask us why we didn't do it. If local agencies want to delete this from their codes, they can do that. We're the ones who should be raising the bar here."
Journal staff writer Paul Edward Parker contributed to this report.
DIGITAL EXTRA: Visit the NFPA's Web page devoted to The Station fire and its aftermath, including proposed code changes, at:
http://www.nfpa.org/Research/fireinvestigation/rislandfire/RIFire.asp
