Digital Extra: The Station Fire

More money may not be available until Oct. 1, when a new federal budget year begins.

01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, February 18, 2004

BY PAUL EDWARD PARKER
Journal Staff Writer

A federal agency investigating The Station nightclub fire will not meet its own April target to finish its probe because it does not have enough money, according to spokesmen for the agency.

"We cannot complete the investigation until we have additional funds," Michael Newman, a spokesman for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said yesterday.

That additional money may not be available until at least Oct. 1, when a new federal budget year begins. That means The Station investigation probably will not wrap up until sometime in 2005, said Newman.

The National Construction Safety Team, a subdivision of the institute, is examining why the fire last Feb. 20 spread through the West Warwick nightclub so fast and why more people were not able to escape unharmed. More than 200 people were injured and 100 died as a result of the fire started by a rock band's indoor fireworks display. The federal investigation is not seeking to assign blame for the tragedy.

The federal agency does not have a separate budget for the Station investigation, Newman said. Instead, the probe is being paid for out of money for the agency's building and fire research laboratory.

When the current federal budget year began Oct. 1, Congress and the president had not reached agreement on a spending plan, so federal agencies operated under continuing resolutions, which allowed them to spend at the same rate as last year. The budget that was finally approved Jan. 23 had much less money in it for the agency's laboratories than President Bush had proposed.

That left the lab conducting the Station investigation without enough money to continue that work, though Newman said investigators will not abandon the project. "I wouldn't say things have come to a halt. We're trying to do what we can under the funding we have right now," said Newman. "This is still a major priority for us. We're definitely committed to completing the Rhode Island investigation. It's not going to get dropped."

Newman said the only way the agency could finish the investigation this year was if Congress approved more money in a supplemental appropriation.

The National Construction Safety Team Advisory Committee, a panel that monitors the National Construction Safety Team, in December recommended that Congress give the team a yearly budget of $2 million, plus a $2-million reserve fund to be used when investigating disasters.

The team was established in the wake of the collapse of the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The team is also investigating the World Trade Center, but has $16 million for that purpose from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Station fire was the first -- and so far only -- investigation started after the team was established.

In its examination of the Station fire, the team has built a replica of the nightclub's stage area, which was covered with flammable packaging foam used as soundproofing. The team conducted test burns of the replica, with and without fire sprinklers in place, to see how installation of sprinklers would have changed what happened at The Station.

The team also is working on a sophisticated computer model of how the fire spread through the building.

Investigators still want to hear from anybody who has information about The Station and the fire. They can be reached by phone, toll-free, at (877) 451-8001; by fax, at (301) 975-6122; by e-mail, at ncst [at] nist.gov, and by mail, at NCST Rhode Island Investigation, NIST, 100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8660, Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8660.

DIGITAL EXTRA: Find more coverage of the anniversary of The Station fire, and look back at its impact over the past year, at:

http://projo.com/extra/2003/stationfire/