WASHINGTON -- Evacuation of a capacity crowd from The Station
nightclub might have taken as few as 100 seconds under ideal conditions,
federal investigators said yesterday, but it also could have dragged on
for 4 1/2 minutes.
"And if you look at the condition of that building 270 seconds after
ignition, that is not a place you want to be in," said William
Grosshandler, leader of the federal team investigating how the February
fire in West Warwick claimed 100 lives.
But in a public report on their progress, investigators stressed that
their initial computer testing of various scenarios at the nightclub
cannot be properly refined without evidence that Rhode Island
authorities have so far refused to share.
Grosshandler's mention of the building's appearance was a reference to
the view of the burning nightclub in the now-famous television video
that has become an essential tool of the investigative team.
Grosshandler called the Station fire "a once-in-a-generation event" from
which lifesaving lessons can be learned.
The investigators also discussed plans to conduct a test-burning of a
replica of the nightclub next week at their agency facilities in
suburban Maryland and to hold a hearing on their probe in Providence as
early as next month -- possibly with testimony from fire survivors.
The calculation of a range of evacuation times was one of the highlights
of yesterday's report by a division of the National Institute of
Standards and Technology. It is also a key baseline for the detailed
computer model of the fire that the team is building in order to gauge
the importance of such factors as the building's lack of sprinklers, the
presence of flammable soundproofing foam on the walls, and even the
behavior of panicky customers clogging the club's front exit.
But agency investigators and advisers voiced fears that the refusal of
Rhode Island Atty. Gen. Patrick Lynch and others to share evidence from
the fire will defeat the federal effort to learn lifesaving lessons from
the Station disaster.
"The fact that there's a warehouse with 717 pieces of exemplary
material" unavailable to the federal team is "a major hole" in its
investigation, said Glenn P. Corbett, a fire expert who sits on the
investigative team's advisory board. The problem is particularly
troubling, said Corbett, a professor at New York's John Jay College of
Criminal Justice, because the Station fire probe is one of the first
assignments of the fledgling federal investigative team, formed by an
act of Congress in the wake of the World Trade Center collapse.
"It's almost like a 'why-bother?' situation," said Corbett. "We might as
well wait four or five years" to do the investigation, he remarked
half-jokingly, since it could take that long to resolve the criminal
case that Lynch is pursuing and the numerous civil damage suits filed in
the fire's aftermath.
Nevertheless, the investigative unit, known as the agency's "National
Construction Safety Team," is proceeding apace, according to
Grosshandler, who detailed these aspects of the probe during a meeting
of the team's advisory committee:
The team has completed about 75 percent of the task of ascertaining the
"geometry" of The Station, which includes such factors as the floor
plan, the location of vents, doors, windows and so forth.
The team has established about 20 percent of its inventory of the
building's construction materials and contents at the time of the fire.
Grosshandler explained that this information is crucial to the
"assumptions" upon which the team will base its computer model. For
example, another team member explained, one material may burn at a
different rate than another or produce different toxins as it burns --
all key factors in drawing conclusions that may lead to safer building
construction and maintenance.
Grosshandler stressed that his agency's computer simulations of
evacuation scenarios is not yet precise enough to include such variables
as how smoke, heat and other factors might have impeded flight from the
building during the actual fire last winter. But the simulations help
set ``baselines'' for how evacuation might ideally work, he said; other
information may be factored into the agency's computer models as it
becomes available, he said.
The team is preparing to hire outside contractors to put the apparent
code violations at The Station into national and historical context by
researching, for example, how standard building, fire and safety codes
changed in the United States during the life of the West Warwick
building.
The team is preparing to hold a hearing in Rhode Island in part to
explain its work to the public and in part to solicit information --
perhaps including personal testimony from survivors -- that could aid
the probe. The team and the advisory panel discussed how witnesses might
be offered confidentiality in the event that Lynch's probe or the civil
cases make public testimony impossible.
Mike Healy, a spokesman for Lynch, said, "We recognize the value of what
NIST is doing, but what they are doing is a civil, regulatory
investigation. The criminal prosecution has to come first and we won't
allow anybody to derail us from that goal."
Asked how the federal probe could derail the attorney general's
investigation, Healy said any public discussion of particular pieces of
evidence could violate the rules protecting the secrecy of grand jury
proceedings. A Rhode Island grand jury is investigating the fire, Healy
noted.
Healy said that after evaluating NIST's initial request for evidence
some months ago, the attorney general's office did give the agency
investigators some evidence but denied most of the requested items.
"We gave what we could and withheld what we deemed essential," Healy
said. He said every request for access to evidence -- including many
from parties to civil lawsuits springing from the fire -- has been
weighed independent of the others.
Healy said he did not know what specific kinds of evidence have been
shared with NIST or any other entity.
Michael Rubin, the NIST lawyer on hand at yesterday's meeting, said he
was "not pessimistic" that the Rhode Island authorities might share
information essential to the agency's investigation as time goes on.
"That sounds correct," said Healy, but he cautioned that more
information might not be shared until the criminal case "takes its
course." Asked whether the attorney general's office is negotiating with
NIST over the release of evidence, he said, "there is not a back and
forth by any means."
DIGITAL EXTRA: Find out more about the mission of the National Institute
of Standards and Technology, its current investigations and findings
related to The Station fire, at:
http://www.nist.gov/
