Digital Extra: The Station Fire

Richard Gould is creating a lasting record of the items people have brought to The Station site to honor their loved ones.

01:00 AM EST on Friday, February 20, 2004

BY LINDA BORG
Journal Staff Writer

One day in late June, a neighbor heard a pounding coming from the former site of The Station nightclub and went to investigate. She found a woman hammering homemade wooden crosses into the ground.

A few days later, Richard Gould, a Brown archaeologist whose volunteer group had been asked to recover personal belongings from the site, returned to the scene to find 100 crosses, each painted a light purple and decorated with a plastic butterfly and a string of plastic beads.

The following day, Gould and a volunteer, Randi Scott, began recording the memorials that flowered on the site as soon as the bulldozers had razed the remains of the nightclub.

Gould, who invented a new discipline called disaster archaeology in the wake of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, knew that it was important to document this memorial to the 100 victims of the nightclub fire.

He calls his work ethno-archaeology: the observation of living people in real time.

"The whole experience in West Warwick has made me far more concerned about the way in which we use our scholarly abilities," said Gould, who once spent three years among the Australian aborigines. "Everyone thinks of archaeology as a study of the past, but those skills can be put to a very good use that benefits the community."

As streams of mourners arrived at 211 Cowesett Ave., Gould catalogued the poems and the pizza boxes, the teddy bears and the fuzzy dice, the plastic flowers and the inflatable guitars, that transformed the plain crosses into highly personal tributes to the dead.

Gould and Scott have monitored the site almost continuously, visiting two or three times a week, each visit lasting several hours.

As time passed, the site has evolved from raw earth to an outline of bare crosses to the richly embroidered memorials of today. And Gould has observed a parallel transformation in the feelings of those mourning the dead, from a rough grief to a more muted and layered sense of loss.

What has emerged is an ever-changing document of a community's collective grief, recorded in photographs and in words based on interviews with family members and friends.

On Aug. 20, six months after the fire, Gould was present when a large group of survivors and victims' families gathered at the site for an impromptu memorial. Throughout the snow and cold, the visits have continued unabated. Sometimes, 40 people will turn up at the site in an hour.

The project has shown Gould that science can be shaped, even enriched, by subjective experience.

The fire has also informed the way Gould practices disaster archaeology, a discipline he forged during his excavation of Lower Manhattan in the wake of Sept. 11.

Gould trained a team of volunteers, mostly Brown graduate students and Providence police detectives, to mobilize in the event of a disaster. Their mission is humanitarian in nature -- to unearth personal artifacts that could be returned to the families as part of the healing process.

At the West Warwick site, Gould's group, called Forensic Archaeology Recovery, discovered key rings, wallets, ID cards and jewelry -- some of which were fused together by the fire's intense heat. One cell phone had 19 messages from an alarmed family member: "Where are you?" "Are you OK?"

The team also retrieved a number of discount cards issued by supermarkets and drugstore chains. In some cases, the medical examiner was able to use the bar codes to identify victims.

One big lesson culled from the Station fire had little to do with science, however. It involved the human toll on the volunteers, many of them young graduate students ill-equipped to deal with a disaster of this magnitude.

"You never have anyone who has lost a family member or a close friend work in the hot zone," Gould said. "That's important for evidentiary as well as emotional reasons. If you knew one of the victims, your work could be challenged on the grounds that you were biased."

The other lesson? That no volunteer ever works alone.

"This is emotionally very difficult work," Gould said. "We don't want to put anyone in the position of having to deal with this by himself."

The living memorial now occupies a fat, loose-eaf binder stuffed with field notes and drawings, plus countless boxes of photos.

"We don't know where this is going," Gould said, "but we're learning as we go."