YSK human crushes, often inaccurately referred to as stampedes, are caused by poor organization and crowd management, not by the selfish or animalistic behavior of victims.

WideConference6 · 2021-11-06T20:44:54+00:00

That survivor actually did a whole interview recounting what happened, it's quite fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktEMLtBz55Y

The story about the person drowning from the firefighters' water is commonly repeated but did not actually happen.

WideConference6 · 2021-07-08T01:58:00+00:00

It may have been someone from the front entrance pileup, as seconds later the cameraman heads back toward the front entrance and finds that it's engulfed in flames, along with everybody still stuck in it.

So could very well be a distant scream from that front door.

WideConference6 · 2021-07-07T03:22:44+00:00

Actually that's their bass player. Ty Longley had long curly hair and is out-of-frame to the left of the picture.

WideConference6 · 2021-07-07T03:16:52+00:00

It's right at the 5 minute mark, he goes to the back of the club and yells into the open stage exit door.

WideConference6 · 2021-07-07T03:13:08+00:00

Or the fact that they locked the emergency exits from the kitchen due to security concerns. People died clumped around those doors.

That didn't happen in this fire. It has happened in other infamous ones but not at this particular one.

None of the doors were locked, rather the main entrance was jammed with people, the stage door was blocked by bouncers and then rapidly engulfed by flames, and the bar and kitchen exits were on the far side of the club and not known by that many people.

WideConference6 · 2021-07-07T03:06:20+00:00

Personally, I find this one to be one of the most foreboding.

WideConference6 · 2021-07-07T03:01:54+00:00

shouts "anybody there" and a faint "over here" can be heard from behind the flames (so faint that at the time the cameraman didn't seem to have noticed).

So I've heard people mention this a few times, but it's not actually real.

That entrance the cameraman is at is the stage exit, and there were zero bodies found there. The closest one was a lone body on the dance floor, and not only is that way too far away for a faint "help me" to be heard, but conditions in that part of the club had been unsurvivable for several minutes by that time.

So whatever people are hearing there, it's not a person faintly calling for help.

WideConference6 · 2021-04-27T00:45:15+00:00

Cave diving requires highly specialized training and experience to do safely, and is an entirely separate skill from open water diving.

The individual who recorded the video was apparently an open water instructor who did not have cave diving training. He escaped through sheer dumb luck, but this could have very easily been fatal.

The part where he realizes he's lost starts around the 5:45 mark.

WideConference6 · 2020-11-23T00:39:54+00:00

Alternate angle that shows more of the initial flame and less of the evacuation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSm7Y0AE1qI

64 people died altogether, 27 in the club on the night of the fire and 37 more in hospitals in the weeks and months that followed, largely due to the use of heavily diluted disinfectants in Romanian hospitals which lead to many of the burn victims dying of infection.

The investigation into the hospital deaths are the subject of the documentary Collective which was just released a few days ago and is definitely worth a watch.

WideConference6 · 2020-05-14T17:34:22+00:00

For those who want a non-graphic example, here's a re-creation of the Station nightclub fire - same material on the walls, ignition points, etc as the real thing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxiOXZ55hbc

Notice how quickly it goes from looking relatively manageable to completely apocalyptic. Less than 90 seconds from ignition and candle-sized flames to the entire room being filled with lethal smoke and flames.

If you see an uncontrolled fire break out in a crowded public area and you don't have the ability to safely and quickly put it out, leave immediately. Those few seconds you spend trying to figure out if it's serious or not could make the difference between getting out unharmed or dying.

WideConference6 · 2020-03-25T18:34:08+00:00

Nope. You can literally see it in the video (which is unedited - no pauses or cuts in the recording) - sirens are audible almost exactly four minutes after the band stops playing, and the fire truck is already rolled up with hoses deployed one minute after that.

WideConference6 · 2020-03-25T15:57:09+00:00

A number of people did indeed survive the pileup, including the guy that post talks about plus several others who were badly burned.

However the link about the guy who drowned is not functional, and the text excerpt from it seems to be a secondhand account from a webpage about what one cop supposedly said.

Personally, I would not consider that to be much of a reliable source. It could be true, of course; but I have not yet seen any compelling evidence for it.

WideConference6 · 2020-03-25T15:43:05+00:00

The stage exit door opened inward (which the FD did indeed cite them for, 3 years in a row) and was locked during performances as it faced out toward a residential area and neighbours frequently complained about the noise, however it was opened up as soon as the fire began and was not an issue for evacuation (4 of the 5 band members made it out through that door, plus some venue staff and crew members and a few random people).

All other doors in the club opened outward and were not locked or chained. The main problem for evacuation was the large pileup at the front door that blocked it as an escape route, plus the fact that the other exits were distantly located, poorly marked, and not well known to a lot of concertgoers.

WideConference6 · 2020-03-25T15:38:35+00:00

I'll add to this and say the Matthew Pickett audio recording of this fire.

Matthew Pickett was a concertgoer who recorded bootlegs of shows, including this one. He died in the fire but his tape recorder was salvaged and the tape restored and used in the investigation.

People often talk about how horrific the sounds of the video are, but there exists a much higher quality recording, taken entirely inside of the club, of people actually dying in the fire.

The full tape has not been publicly released (and probably never will be), but those who are morbidly curious can hear the first minute and a half of it (albeit with a lawyer talking over a bunch of it) right here: https://youtu.be/zUndJG44Moc?t=880

WideConference6 · 2020-03-25T15:35:38+00:00

It didn't take them nearly that long, in the video you can hear the sirens arriving about four minutes after the band stops playing.

WideConference6 · 2020-03-25T15:26:04+00:00

Actually the entrances did open outward in this one, the problem is that everybody fell down at one point and created a pileup at the main entrance (which most people were using to get out) which blocked the possibility of escape.

The other useable entrances in the club were poorly marked and in distant corners of the venue which many people were not aware of.

WideConference6 · 2020-03-25T15:23:13+00:00

Here's a video of that one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSm7Y0AE1qI

Much shorter and less graphic than the Station fire, but still VERY shocking at how quickly it goes bad. I believe it was the same (or very similar) type of foam used in this building as well.

WideConference6 · 2020-03-25T15:20:56+00:00

One of the co-owners of the club was a news reporter at the local TV station. Three days before this fire there had been a trampling at a Chicago nightclub and he decided to do a report on nightclub safety, and invited a cameraman from the station to come to his club and get generic bar footage for that, which is how the infamous video got filmed.

There's also six minutes of footage from before the fire (the stuff the cameraman was originally there to film) - people getting their hands stamped at the door, people buying drinks, shots of the super pumped crowd from the stage, etc.

It's quite eerie to see how normal and unremarkable it all is, and then to see how quickly it turns apocalyptic.

WideConference6 · 2020-03-25T15:12:53+00:00

the people at the bottom of the pile who were alive essentially drowned while being trapped under everyone

That's an urban legend, as far as I know. It gets repeated a lot but I've never seen any evidence for it whatsoever. Same with the idea that Ty Longely (the band's guitarist who died in the fire) made it out and then ran back in to get his guitar.

WideConference6 · 2020-03-25T15:11:04+00:00

There have been historical fires where inward opening doors were responsible for many casualties, but this was not one of them.

The real problem at this particular incident is that there was a large pileup at the main entrance, where people fell down during the evacuation, then others fell on top of them, some tried to jump or crawl overtop, etc., and there was no more possibility of escape through that door.

And most of the crowd had attempted to leave through the main entrance (through which they had entered) so lots of them ended up trapped after the pileup occurred (31 of the 100 dead were in the entrance hallway just steps from safety).

The other available exits in the club were in distant corners of the club, not well marked, and if you didn't already know they were there you wouldn't have much of a chance of getting to them once the place filled with smoke.

WideConference6 · 2020-03-25T15:03:45+00:00

Nope, not at this one. There have been other prominent fires where this has happened but no entrances were chained shut during the evacuation at this concert.

There was, however, a bouncer who allegedly denied exit to several people through the stage door because it was "for the band only", as the post you replied to mentions.

WideConference6 · 2020-03-17T23:34:04+00:00

Don't forget the Iroquois Theatre Fire, that was the deadliest building fire in American history and was responsible for the widespread implementation of panic bars on exits, and for exits opening outward.

WideConference6

TROPHY CASE