Engineers Debate Safety of Public Places

Feb. 22, 2003 -- The music is deafening. The whole club seems to throb to the beat of the band. It's dark. And then something goes wrong.

In Rhode Island on Thursday night, it was fire. In Chicago on Sunday night, it began with pepper spray.

But safety engineers say sometimes, the cause of the trouble is not what kills people. Instead, it's the crush of people trying to escape.

"A crowd crush, as it's happening, is almost impossible to stop," said Jake Pauls, a safety consultant based in Silver Spring, Md. "The physical forces are just too high."

Safety has long been an issue in crowded, dark clubs. But Pauls says any public place — a nightclub, a restaurant, a sports arena — can turn dangerous if too many people are packed in and trouble breaks out.

Warning Signs

The trouble at The Station, a nightclub in W. Warwick, R.I., began with a pyrotechnics flash on stage that ended up igniting other material. Within minutes, the entire club was in flames.

Twice in the last month — at a club in Florida and another in New Jersey — owners say the same band, Great White, set off fireworks on stage without telling them.

"Thank God we're here today to speak about that," said Dominic Santana, owner of The Stone Pony in Asbury Park, N.J.

American history is peppered with cases in which small fires led to calamity in crowded places:

At the Iroquois Theater in Chicago in 1903, 602 people died.

At the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston in 1942, 492 died.

At the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Kentucky in 1977, 167 died.

Local fire codes are supposed to protect against such disasters. They spell out how many people should be allowed in a given space, and how many exits there need to be. Engineers have found that at least half the people in a crowd will try to leave the same way they came in, even if another fire exit is closer, so at newer clubs, the main entrances are supposed to be extra-wide.

Engineers say if the code is followed, people ought to be safe. On Tuesday, there was a nightclub fire in Minneapolis and all 120 people inside escaped. The city gave the club high marks for safety.

A National Problem?

"The system is pretty sound, and the requirements are pretty proven," said Arthur Cote, executive vice president of the National Fire Protection Association. When things go wrong, he says, "it's very rarely one failure; it's usually multiple failures that lead to the disaster situation."

But many nightclubs — there is no national count — do not follow the codes. Many of them are in old buildings, with narrow stairs and poor lighting.

And safety engineers say that since Sept. 11, 2001 — with people more likely than usual to panic — cities face budget deficits and staff cuts. As a result, there is no saying they can all be counted upon to enforce their own rules.

"We are devoting less resources to public entertainment facilities and so on," said consultant Pauls, "so I see this as a national problem."

Indeed, the problem has been forced back onto the national stage by two tragedies in a week.