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c h a P t e r 2 7 burn i ng 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 b u r n i n g q u e s t i o n 205 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...

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