Digital Extra: The Station Fire

"We're really having a difficult time getting information," a caller from Miriam Hospital complains to a West Warwick fire dispatcher.

10:23 AM EDT on Tuesday, August 3, 2004

BY MARK ARSENAULT and ZACHARY R. MIDER
Journal Staff Writers

PROVIDENCE -- Thirty minutes after ambulances had taken the last of the injured from The Station nightclub fire, Miriam Hospital heard a rumor of another wave of burn victims on the way.

The hospital emergency room called the West Warwick Fire Department three times that night before the E.R. was satisfied that no more victims were coming.

"We're really having a difficult time getting information," the caller from the hospital complains.

The Miriam phone calls, and others saved on West Warwick fire dispatch tapes made public yesterday, illustrate the need for better communication between rescuers and hospitals -- a problem also cited by a consultant after a year-long study of Rhode Island's response to the 2003 Station fire in West Warwick.

Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, obeying a court decision in a Providence Journal public-records suit, yesterday released about four hours of dispatch recordings made the night of the fire, and a one-page map of The Station nightclub, which shows roughly where rescuers recovered 96 bodies in the wreckage after the club burned down on Feb. 20, 2003.

Four critically injured people later died in hospitals, and about 200 others were injured, some gravely.

The fire started when indoor fireworks during a rock concert ignited flammable packing foam installed to soundproof the club. The club's owners, Michael and Jeffrey Derderian, and the band tour manager who lit the pyrotechnics, Daniel Biechele, are under indictment for manslaughter. They have pleaded not guilty.

To better understand why so many people were killed and hurt in the fire, The Providence Journal has gathered public records about the building, the crowd, and the emergency response to the fire, and has sued to get records officials have refused to provide.

Superior Court Judge Mark A. Pfeiffer last month ruled that the tapes and the body-location map are public records, but Pfeiffer decided that other recorded calls and hundreds of pages of government documents related to The Station should be kept secret.

THE YEAR-LONG STUDY of the state's response to the fire, by defense and homeland-security contractor Titan Corp., found that "there was little communication between receiving hospitals and the incident site or with inbound" ambulances carrying patients.

"Patients arrived unannounced at hospital emergency departments, often in rapid sequence," Titan wrote in its report, which was released two weeks ago.

Though the report praised the hospitals for the medical care they provided, Titan noted that there was no system to notify hospitals of the size of the disaster, or to find out how many patients each hospital could handle. When Kent Hospital, in Warwick, put out a call to other hospitals on a special Nextel phone system, nobody answered.

Kent received 55 patients in the first 45 minutes after the fire.

A Cranston dispatcher is on the tapes, calling his counterpart, Kevin Correia, in West Warwick:

"Yeah, Cranston here. Hey -- I called Kent. Um, they're getting a little overwhelmed with severe burn patients. If you could advise whoever's triaging down there, to send the worst -- and any burned -- to Rhode Island Hospital."

Correia doesn't hear the message at first; he's too busy handling other calls.

The concern from Kent is passed along to the triage area at the fire scene:

Dispatch: "Triage, I just got a call from Kent. They're overwhelmed with burn patients. If you could, could you send everyone else to Rhode Island?"

Triage: "Uh, rescues are using their own discretion at this time. I'm just triaging for the patients out of here."

Dispatch: "Message received."

Later that night, Correia answers a call from a woman representing the Miriam Hospital Emergency Department:

Miriam: "This is Miriam E.D. calling. I'm just trying to get an idea of how many casualties will be coming in. We're really having a difficult time getting information."

Dispatch: "Where are you calling from, miss?"

Miriam: "Miriam Emergency Department."

Dispatch: "I believe they stopped transporting people. About a half-hour, they stopped."

Miriam: "OK. Thank you very much."

The hospital soon calls back, seeking official word about victims from a ranking Fire Department officer:

Dispatch: "West Warwick fire, Centracchio."

Miriam: "Yes, are you the incident commander?"

Dispatch: "No."

Miriam: "This is Miriam E.R. calling. We are trying to decide if whether we can stop our [inaudible] system, if we're getting any more patients. And we can't seem to -- I know they said something about the last [victims] were transported half an hour ago, but, um, we didn't -- we're trying to get an official."

Dispatch: "All right, let me see what I can do for you. Hold on a second."

The answer, if there was one, is not apparent on the tapes released yesterday.

The Miriam emergency room calls back again:

Miriam: "I'm sorry, West Warwick, this is Miriam again. A fire personnel had just come in and said that there was 20 more victims coming from the scene. And I was just trying to, to -- either confirm that, or tell us that's not true. We're getting rumors now."

Dispatch: "Hold on a second."

On the tape, a dispatcher is heard asking somebody else in the radio room, "We don't have any more people coming from the scene being transported to Miriam, do we?" Back on the phone, he tells the hospital: "No, it's a rumor, then, there's no more coming."

Miriam: "Thank you very much."

A supervisor at Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island in Pawtucket calls West Warwick fire to ask about patients. "We can go into disaster mode," the supervisor offers.

No, West Warwick answers. "They've stopped transporting all patients. They've transported everyone they had to transport, in other words."

Memorial -- which received only one patient from the fire, according to Titan -- responds: "So, we're all set then?"