Tuesday, November 03, 2015
Thirty-One Killed, 183 Injured Pyro-Sparked Nightclub Fire in Romania
PLSN: A fire sparked by pyro effects during a performance by heavy metal band Goodbye to Gravity ignited foam decor and raced across the ceiling within the crowded Colectiv nightclub at about 10:30 p.m. Oct. 30, filling the venue with smoke and fumes. About 400 people were in the club at the time of the fire. Thirty-one were killed, including the band’s two guitarists, according to news reports.
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We were just talking about fires in Tech Management. When buildings catch on fire, it’s serious. We watched the video on the Station Night Club fire and the building was literally spewing fire within 8 minutes. That is not a lot of time to recognize the fire as a threat and to get yourself out around all the other people who are all thinking the same thing. Of all the fires that we talked about in class, the biggest contributors to deaths was that there weren't enough working exits and that there were too many people. Capacity is a serious thing. A building’s capacity means that’s how many people can get out of the building in case of a fire.
I for one am really glad that other venues are taking this fire seriously and shutting down their spaces. After the Station Night Club fire, American fire code laws got a lot more strict. Hopefully we can see more countries taking steps to prevent loss of life in fires.
Accidents, especially such devastating ones, rarely comes to one's mind when we think about events in the entertainment industry. We're way more aware of safety when it comes to things such as transportation or sports, but we never go to see a show with the expectation of even a possibility to be injured. This is also why safety is so important - people are less aware and thus will react much slower, as in this case even a band member initially joked that "This wasn't part of the program" before he realized the seriousness of the situation. I think one major issue is, as I mentioned in one of my last week's posts, people's attitude towards safety in theatre/concert venues. If people treat the possibility of safety hazards seriously, the performers and audience will also learn its importance and seriousness.
Reading about fire accident in entertainment venues always makes me upset. The fact is, these tragedies can be easily prevented. From the article, it seems like the emergency exits did not function the way they were supposed to. This just exacerbates the already packed and small space of a communist era style basement bunker. If anything positive were to come out of this tragedy are some stricter fire regulations. Fire tragedies is where most rules and regulations about fire saftey come from. We try and learn from our mistakes. I am glad that this learning process is already starting with the shut downs of other spaces that could in the future have a similar issue. Fire safety is extremely important and often discounted. This ends up in tragedy, as seen in Romania and many other places around the world.
So, I remember the Station Night Club fire. I grew up about an hour away from Providence, RI, and it was the only news story that any networks covered for what seemed like 2 months afterwards. Those videos are pretty firmly imprinted in my brain, even almost 15 years later, and I think that it definitely influenced how I interact with public spaces like restaurants and bars (Identifying exits immediately upon entering a new space, leaving a space if I feel uncomfortable etc).
As a manager, I seem to end up working in non-traditional spaces quite frequently. Currently, I'm working in the warehouse, which presents some very real safety concerns that are different than our traditional theater spaces. One of those concerns is the simple familiarity of our audience with the space. Even though strangers interact with the Rauh and the Chosky regularly, there is a certain mass of audience in both of those spaces that are Drama students and faculty, and thus know the evacuation routes/best practices for handling emergencies in both spaces. In the warehouse, very few people in the SOD are really aware of the warehouse's footprint etc, so you have no such critical mass of people who are able to react quickly. Additionally, the people who work in there most frequently, production personnel and designers, are frequently not on-site for every performance, so if a stage management team/cast does not rehearse on-site, they are also not familiar with the space on as an instinctual of a level as they are in Purnell. This makes articulating an emergency plan far more important when working in the warehouse than it would be in Purnell, which is something I think about a lot.
Safety is something that we should not be taking lightly in the entertainment industry, but in some places it seems to be treated as an afterthought. When I was in high school we would frequently fail fire inspections, move something around backstage to pass, and then move it back when the fire marshal left. Not only did the head of drama acknowledge this, but he encouraged it. This definitely wouldn't fly in a real theater, but it's this kind of mentality that can be potentially fatal. The kids leaving our school will now always think that this kind of behavior is acceptable, but as this tragic story shows it's not. Yes, there's a difference between having a small chair in an exit space and having too few exits in the first place, but this all could add up to a potentially larger problem. Fires can become out of control extremely quickly, and unless there's an easy way to escape or combat the fire the death toll can be devastating. It's a good thing that other buildings are now being reinspected, yet to me it still feels like too little too late.
This is so horrible. We were just talking about entertainment venue fires in technical management, and it's hard for me to imagine something more terrifying. We watched videos of the Station Night Club fire that threw me into an awful sadness for at least half the day. This situation seems to be almost exactly the same: a piece of foam that is set on fire by pyrotechnics, not enough exits, not realizing the gravity of the situation early enough, the trampling of people in the panic, etc. It is all especially terrifying to me because my mom is handicapped. She has nothing but bone scraping bone where her knees should be, which makes it incredibly difficult for her to walk even at a slow pace. If I were in a theatre with her where people are trampling each other to escape a fire, I do not know what would happen to us. It is one of the most frightening thoughts I can imagine, and part of the reason why tech management upset me so much that day. As a manager, I will try my best not to forget the feeling of terror I encounter when I think of a theatre fire or a nightclub fire, because I want to do my best to ensure that this is not something that ever, ever happens on my watch.
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