Twenty years ago on 20-Feb-2003, 100 people were killed when a fire caused by illegal pyrotechnics ignited sound foam at a Great White concert at the Station Nightclub in Warwick, RI.
Within minutes the building was engulfed in flame and toxic smoke as the highly flammable polyurethane foam glued to the nightclub’s walls as soundproofing ignited.
The evacuation of the building turned to chaos as patrons surged toward the exits.
At the time that the fire began there were reportedly over 440 occupants in the club. This fire completely destroyed the building and resulted in 100 fatalities and over 200 injuries, becoming the fourth deadliest nightclub fire in U.S. history.
“Following several months of study and analysis, several changes to key NFPA codes were completed resulting in new requirements that would help to mitigate similar occurrences in the future. These changes were made to NFPA 101®, Life Safety Code®, and NFPA 5000®, Building Construction and Safety Code®, relating to Assembly Occupancies and included provisions for crowd managers, added further restrictions on festival seating unless a life safety evaluation had been completed, required facilities to conduct egress inspections before opening for business, and added provisions that would require automatic sprinklers in existing nightclub-type assembly occupancies with occupant loads of over 100 and in all new nightclub- type assembly occupancies. The Tentative Interim Amendments (TIAs), which were approved by the NFPA Standards Council as interim requirements in July of 2003 became permanent provisions of the 2006 editions of NFPA 101, Life Safety Code, and NFPA 5000, Building Construction and Safety Code, as well as NFPA 1, Uniform Fire CodeTM.
Additionally, the 2006 editions of NFPA 101 and NFPA 5000 require the main entrance/exit of new nightclub-type assembly occupancies to accommodate not less than two-thirds of the total occupant load. Other exits must accommodate not less than one-half the total occupant load. Thus, the total egress capacity must accommodate 117% of the total occupant load.”
-Source; National Fire Prevention Association
There was a news crew shooting video that night for a story they were working on about, ironically, nightclub safety. They captured the fire from ignition until the fire department arrived and the horrors of how quickly it went from a night of fun to an absolute nightmare.
WARNING: The video is raw https://archive.org/details/station-fire-2003-stabilized-uncut/Butler+HQ+cut.webm
Sources: South Fire District Firefighters IAFF Local 3918 and Normal FD