Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (27 page)

And so the process continued — locate, extract, bag, pray, debrief — ninety-six times, until the dreadful task was complete. The only responder to participate in every single recovery was
ME
investigator Kingston. No one thought to check on
his
mental status.

Not everyone on-site had been quick to appreciate the gravity of the situation. Seventeen hours earlier, as flames shot into the night sky above The Station, and terrified screams rent the air, the DelSesto twins, Cara and Lisa, stood in the club’s parking lot. They had exited unharmed with the first wave of survivors, along with Michael Kaczmarczyk of the band Human Clay. Cara spied Jack Russell, Great White’s lead singer, and called to him, “Jack, what the hell happened?” Russell replied that the band “had permission” to use the pyro. “If anyone died, I don’t know what I’ll do,” lamented the rocker, who proceeded to bum a cigarette from Cara. She began to cry. Russell responded with a hug.

Cara’s sister, Lisa, attempted small talk. “I’ve never seen Great White before. It’s too bad this happened.”

Russell replied, “Well, we’ll be on tour this summer.”

CHAPTER 19

SOLID GASOLINE

IN 1970,
THREE NIGHTCLUB OWNERS
in Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, France, thought it would be a great idea to line their club’s walls and ceiling with spray-on polyurethane foam, sculpting it to resemble a grotto. The “Club Cinq-Sept” burned furiously after a dropped match ignited a chair, then the foam, killing 146 people (including two of the club’s owners) in less than five minutes. It didn’t help that the owners had installed one-way turnstiles at the entrance and padlocked three emergency exits to keep out gate crashers. But what sealed the crowd’s fate was the rain of molten, flaming polyurethane foam that set tables, chairs, and patrons on fire within seconds.

Three years later, designers at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios in West Hollywood, California, used polyurethane foam to build a set for Sid and Marty Krofft ’s low-budget children’s
TV
show
Sigmund and the Sea Monsters
. (It made the pair’s previous paean to pot-inspired kids’ fantasy,
H. R. Pufnstuf
, look like
Gone with the Wind
.) Apparently the ’70s substance of choice for faux grottos, the foam was originally intended as insulation for industrial buildings. When it burned, causing $3 million in property damage in a few minutes, the flame front expanded with such speed that the fire’s gases pushed out one of the exterior walls of the building.

Then, in 1986, when the Dupont Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, burned, killing ninety-seven persons, it was discovered that a significant contributor to the fire’s lethality had been a plastic foam “air wall” used to divide a ballroom. The polystyrene foam in the divider was intended for use as insulation on the outside of buildings.

You would think that the manufacturers of plastic foam products would thereafter take pains to warn the public that flammable foam should never be used in any building application where it might be exposed to heat or flame — much less in a public gathering place. You would be wrong.

Polyurethane was the brainchild of Otto Bayer, a German chemist. In 1937, he patented the basic process that combines a chemical called a “polyol” with
an “isocyanate,” creating a versatile plastic substance. In later years, scientists figured out how to introduce tiny bubbles into the product, and polyurethane (
PU
) foam was born. Today, in its open-celled flexible form, it gently cushions our bedding, our furniture, our cars, and our airplanes. This lightweight and wonderfully spongy material is used in everything from packing crates to bras. Over
two billion pounds
of the featherweight stuff enters the U.S. market every year. It is all around us, comforting our sleep and softening the blows of everyday life. And if it catches fire, it burns like holy hell.

This last fact has long been known throughout the foam plastics industry. Over the years, foam manufacturers have been acutely aware of precautions necessary for safe storage and handling of the material. By contrast, the history of the industry’s educating
consumers
about foam’s fatal propensities is a study in economic calculation and, at times, outright deception. It is the story of an industry that has encouraged ever-expanding use of its products while resisting safety regulations or public education that might slow market growth.

In order to understand how knowledge of foam plastic’s fire danger was suppressed over the years, it is necessary to go back to the worst nightclub fire in U.S. history — the Cocoanut Grove fire in 1942. In the aftermath of that tragedy, which was caused by fire racing across flammable ceiling-hung fabric decorations, A. J. Steiner of Underwriters Laboratories developed a test to determine the “surface burning characteristics” or “flame spread” rating for building materials. His test, which came to be called the “Steiner tunnel test,” involved a twenty-four-foot-long burning chamber in which the tested material was suspended horizontally (as on a ceiling) and ignited at one end by a gas flame. The rate of flame spread along the material’s surface was compared with that of known benchmark materials, and a numerical rating was issued. For example, asbestos/concrete board had a rating of zero; red oak, 100. If something had twice the flame spread rate of red oak, it would get a 200 rating; if one-quarter that of red oak, 25. By the 1960s, most state building codes classified building materials with a flame spread rate of 25 as “noncombustible.”

When A. J. Steiner conceived of his test method, polyurethane foam had not yet been invented. If polyurethane foam is subjected to the Steiner tunnel test, however, a curious thing happens. The foam melts as it burns, dripping off the horizontally oriented test sample to form blazing puddles below and removing the flame front from the test sample, slowing or stopping its horizontal progress. As a result,
PU
foam’s measured “flame spread rating” under the Steiner test is very low — about a quarter that of red oak. Orient
the foam vertically, as on the walls of the Station nightclub, and the result is very different. Fire races upward, consuming the foam in seconds, as flaming liquid cascades downward, burning everything in its path.

Up until 1974, manufacturers of
PU
foam marketed their product for building applications as “non-burning,” “self-extinguishing,” and “25 flame spread,” based in part upon its performance in the horizontally oriented 1945 Steiner tunnel test. Why the industry finally stopped this deception illustrates how the civil justice system works to inform a regulatory process that is susceptible to inertia and the pressures of special interests. The history leading up to the foam industry’s agreeing with the Federal Trade Commission (
FTC
) to cease use of the misleading descriptors shows how a vigorous state tort law system helps to shape the behavior of those who would ignore safety for the sake of profits.

The 1960s saw a number of fires in underground mines, warehouses, and other industrial structures in which plastic foam played a role. But it took a tragic home fire to awaken regulatory authorities. When fire raced through the Clark County, Missouri, home of Jerry and Minnie Childress on March 10, 1969, it was exposed polyurethane foam that fed the blaze. The couple’s eight-year-old daughter, Kelly, and four-year-old son, Jerry, were killed in the inferno.

The Childresses filed a product liability lawsuit against the manufacturer of the foam, who, based upon the Steiner tunnel test and a smaller, analogous bench test, had labeled the product “non-burning” and “self-extinguishing.” A jury awarded the parents $50,000 for the death of each child and $30,000 for the destruction of their property. The foam manufacturer appealed, huffing that the jury’s verdict was obviously the result of “unreasoned passion.” The appeals court, however, saw it somewhat differently: “The evidence conclusively established the unconscionable irresponsibility of defendant in marketing for home use an explosively flammable product as ‘non-burning’ and ‘self-extinguishing’ on the basis of a test, not explained to the buyers, that was so patently inept and inadequate that any layman would be bound to regard it as better calculated to conceal than reveal the deadly properties of the substance.”

The opinion of the circuit judge in the Childress appeal came to the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, the federal government agency charged with investigating deceptive and misleading trade practices. Particularly interested in the use of the terms “non-burning” and “self-extinguishing,” the
FTC
undertook an investigation of the foam plastics industry nationwide.
The findings from that investigation illustrate why some industries are constitutionally incapable of self-regulation.

The
FTC
found that since the 1950s, the Society of the Plastics Industry Inc. (
SPI
), a plastics industry trade group, had worked with its constituent members to develop test methods for determining the flammability of its products. In 1959, it promulgated a flammability test standard called
ASTM D
-1692, a small-scale laboratory screening procedure that allowed foam plastics to be classified as “non-burning” or “self-extinguishing.” As in the Steiner tunnel test,
ASTM D
-1692 utilized a
horizontally oriented
specimen. From the mid-1960s through 1974, foam manufacturers encouraged and fostered increasing use of their products by relying on the Steiner tunnel test and
ASTMD
-1692 to call their products “noncombustible,” “non-burning,” “self-extinguishing,” and “25 flame spread.”

The
FTC
’s investigation found that the Steiner tunnel test and the
ASTM D
-1692 test were neither reliable nor accurate tests of plastic products “under actual fire conditions.” It determined that, contrary to the marketing language used by foam manufacturers, the products actually had
more
rapid flame spread,
faster
heat production, and
greater
smoke and toxic/flammable gas emission than conventional building materials; also, that some foams “tend to melt or drip in the presence of fire, which can contribute materially to the spread of a blaze.” The
FTC
’s complaint alleged that these facts were known, or should have been known, to the foam plastics industry. It concluded that the industry’s use of the terms “non-burning,” “self-extinguishing,” and “25 flame spread” were “unfair, false, misleading and deceptive” and that the industry had engaged in “unconscionable acts . . . contrary to public policy.”

This is not to say that people seriously interested in testing foam products for fire safety cannot successfully do so. The United States Navy uses plastic foams to sound-insulate its submarines. (Drop a wrench aboard a sub and it can be heard for miles underwater.) Accordingly, the navy funds rigorous tests of foam’s fire performance
under actual fire conditions
because, as noted by one fire expert, Joseph Zicherman, “there’s probably nowhere in the world you want a fire less than a submarine.”