Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (43 page)

Most of the time, delay hurts plaintiffs. Here, counterintuitively, it came to work in their favor.

As we advanced our theories of liability in court against various product manufacturers, one question kept gnawing at our fire experts. One of those consultants, Robert “Brady” Williamson of the University of California at Berkeley, continued to study the Butler video — and puzzle over one of its features. Specifically, he observed that, mere minutes after ignition, flames of blowtorch intensity belched several feet from almost every window and door opening in the club. The stunning speed and ferocity of the blaze suggested to Williamson that some energy-rich fuel, beyond the Derderian-applied polyurethane foam, was feeding the fire. He just could not tell what it was.

CHAPTER 27

BURNING QUESTION

JUST PAST THE SIGN WELCOMING VISITORS
to Kelso, Washington (“Home of the Highlanders”), is the entrance to a dingy industrial park. Nestled between the Truck & Axle Service Corporation and a local airstrip is a large gray metal building where grown men play with matches. And building materials. And substances that people are stupid enough to use as building materials.

The facility is home to the Western Fire Center. There, fire protection engineers conduct computer-monitored full-scale burn tests of materials and structures, and there would be answered one central mystery of the Station tragedy: how a building fire could spread with such fatal intensity in just a minute and a half.

In July 1996, when Howard Julian installed sound-deadening material in the drummer’s alcove of the club, fire safety was not his first priority. Julian spent the better part of a day taking rigid white plastic foam blocks, about seventeen inches square and two and a half inches thick, and screwing them to the three walls of the drummer’s alcove. First, however, he took remnants of soiled red carpet from the club and put them up on the walls as a backing material, figuring it would further deaden the sound. The old rug had another attractive quality: it was free.

Three-inch screws would do it, and Julian drove one at each corner of the white blocks with an electric drill. His then club manager, Tim Arnold, looked on with only passing interest. It was neither the first, nor the last, time an owner of the club would install sound dampening materials of dubious provenance there.

Mickey Mikutowicz’s Black Sabbath tribute band, Believer, played The Station about four times a year for a number of years. The night of July 19, 1996, found him back at the club, pretending to be Ozzy Osbourne after
putting in a long summer day as a landscaper. But the gigs were good fun, and if he watched his costs, Mickey and his group could make a few bucks.

And Mikutowicz was good at watching his costs. He was extremely practical, and concerned with safety, as well. (He was the band leader who insisted on a “no pyro in the dressing room” clause in his contracts after seeing someone from another band pouring gunpowder into a flashpot at The Station with a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth.)

While packing up his band’s equipment the night of his July 1996 Station gig, Mikutowicz noticed a stack of white rigid foam blocks discarded outside the band door of The Station. “They’d be great to pad instrument cases,” he thought, and he threw several into the back of his van. Over the years, Mikutowicz would cut them up and use them in various projects.

Inside the club, Howard Julian finished his installation by spray-painting the white foam blocks on the walls of the drummer’s alcove black, and hanging a black curtain over them. That remained the alcove’s wall treatment for almost three years, until the Derderians bought the club in the spring of 2000. At his first inspection of The Station under the Derderians’ ownership, fire marshal Denis Larocque cited the club for the curtain over the walls of the drummer’s alcove, because it bore no fire-rating label. It was immediately taken down.

What Larocque may have thought about the spray-painted foam blocks underneath the curtain is unknown. Several weeks later, however, the Derderians used 3M spray adhesive to glue gray “egg-crate” polyurethane (
PU
) foam over the entire west end of the club — including the walls of the drummer’s alcove.

Mikutowicz’s band, Believer, was scheduled to play The Station again in February 2003, just eight days after Great White. The night of the fire, Mickey watched the story unfolding on
TV
and listened as reporters spoke of “flammable foam on the club walls.” He immediately thought of the discarded foam blocks he’d picked up outside the band door years earlier. One phone call to the Rhode Island State Police, and a federal
ATF
agent was on Mickey’s doorstep the next day to pick up his last unused block of the foam.

But the block of “Mickey foam” was dense, closed-cell white foam with about the rigidity of “swimming pool noodles” — not the flexible egg-crate stuff everyone saw covering the west end of the club just before the fire. As a result, the single seventeen-by-seventeen block, with curious L-shaped corner-cuts, was thrown into a West Warwick Police Department evidence locker, where it attracted no attention whatsoever — not of the police, the feds, or even the National Institute of Standards and Technology (
NIST
) team
sent to examine the tragedy. Law enforcement would concentrate, for the case’s duration, on the egg-crate polyurethane foam seen catching fire on the corners of the drummer’s alcove in Butler’s video.

For six weeks after the fire, experts hired by the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee combed the club’s wreckage for artifacts that might be of possible use in the civil litigation. They gathered over seven hundred specimens and took over a thousand photographs as they did. Affixed to each specimen was an embossed-brass exhibit tag. The investigators attached tag number 458 to materials covering a section of the south wall of the drummer’s alcove. These materials escaped being completely consumed by fire because they were so tightly sandwiched between the drummer’s riser and the wall itself. The wall materials were removed intact and stored in the plaintiffs’ civil evidence warehouse.

Several months after the fire, plaintiffs’ fire expert Brady Williamson still couldn’t grasp what energy-rich fuel, beyond the
PU
foam, drove the roaring blaze seen on the Butler video. Sure, the
PU
foam caught fire quickly, almost like flash paper, but it would have expended its energy and burned out just as quickly. Even the
NIST
investigators seemed troubled by this conundrum, writing,

Once ignited, the polyurethane foam reached peak heat release rates . . . in less than 60 seconds. . . . The polyurethane foam was a low density material and was quick to ignite, but the mass of the foam was consumed in a relatively short period of time. The foam would have contributed to a quick initial fire growth, but typically would not have had sufficient mass to carry the fire past the initial stages.

Williamson felt strongly that something else had contributed to the initial fuel load, and in a big way.

On July 1, 2005, I joined about fifty lawyers, their fire experts, and photographers under a tent that had been erected in a field across the street from the West Warwick Police Station. We were invited there by the attorney general’s office to view Station fire artifacts stored in an evidence locker — actually, just a rusted green metal cargo container — for the pending criminal proceedings. It was pouring rain, and I was no more enthused about the endeavor than anyone else there. One by one, exhibits were removed from the locker and placed on a table, where we took turns photographing and videotaping them.
No spokesman commented on any exhibit. It was show-and-tell without any “tell.” A dumb-show in the most literal sense. And just about as helpful.

One of the objects photographed, and speculated about, was a seventeen-by-seventeen-inch square of white foam, bearing an address label for one “Mikutowicz, Michael” of Adams, Massachusetts — hours away from West Warwick, Rhode Island. The foam was actually a laminate, consisting of four fused 5/8-inch-thick layers. I thought that perhaps Mikutowicz was some plastics expert or fire engineer. In any event, it was clear that the foam looked nothing like the egg-crate
PU
foam everyone knew caught fire. There were a few singed remnants of the actual
PU
foam, and those were venerated like the Shroud of Turin. But the clean white block of rigid laminated foam, with its small L-shaped corner-cuts, drew little interest from me or anyone else in the sodden crowd. It was quickly returned to the metal storage container.

I turned to my fire expert, Carl Duncan, and deadpanned, “Well,
that
stuff’s the key to the case.” We both laughed. What a useless exercise. It was getting late, and we were both getting wetter by the minute. After a few more worthless fire remnants made the rounds of the crowd, we repaired to our cars, convinced the day had been an utter waste.

Two months later, while I sat in my office, mired in motions, objections, and legal memos, my phone rang. It was Duncan. “Get out your exhibit photos from the fire scene. You’re gonna love this,” he began excitedly. “OK. Look at the pictures of Exhibit 458 — the mess of stuff from the wall of the drummer’s alcove.” I did. It was unrecognizable trash — singed fiber, plastic, screws, and pieces of carpet. It meant nothing to me.

“Look at the edge of the white stuff,” insisted Duncan. The material was heat-deformed and smoke-stained, but on closer inspection it looked like half-melted blocks of some four-ply material. And each block appeared to have a small, L-shaped notch cut out of the corner. “Look familiar?” crowed the fire investigator. Sure did. It was the same material as the clean white block from the West Warwick police evidence locker — with the name “Mikutowicz, Michael” on its label.

Once my heart rate returned to baseline, I placed a call to the only Michael Mikutowicz listed in Adams, Massachusetts, immediately discovering that this gentleman was no plastics engineer or fire scientist. “Mickey” Mikutowicz was a landscaper and snowboard instructor by day and Ozzy Osbourne imitator by night. The story of his acquiring the foam blocks outside The Station’s band door in 1996 was a revelation to me. “I know this is a long shot, but it’s very, very important,” I pleaded. “Do you possibly have any more of that stuff?”