Trying to Grasp the Rising Toll of Nightclub Fire

When Karen Silva heard The Station was in flames, she grabbed a phone to call her friend Chris Raposa.

On Friday, she watched numbly as a backhoe chewed up the rubble of what was once her favorite nightclub in a search for bodies. Next to her, across the street from the remains of the one-story building, stood Raposa.

“I was so afraid he was in there,” Silva said.

Silva and Raposa were part of a pack that loved the concert club adjacent to a large automotive repair center because it played music from their era, the ‘80s. Sometimes their crowd went there two or three times a week, and not long ago, Raposa and his band, God’s Little Joke, played a gig at The Station. Silva cheered him on.

Both were planning to head over to The Station on Thursday to hear Great White. They had heard the barrage of radio promos for the group, and Silva noticed Great White’s tour bus outside the club as she drove home from work at an accounting firm in nearby Providence. But an old back injury flared up, and Silva decided she wasn’t up to standing in the throng she knew Great White would attract.

Raposa said Friday that he just “got lazy.” Instead of going to the club, he stayed home with his wife, Dhana -- whom he met four years ago at The Station. When Silva called him at midnight Thursday, his reaction was, “Oh my God, Great White uses pyrotechnics.”

To let their own eyes confirm what they had seen all day on television, the two met across from The Station late Friday. They milled around in a motel parking lot packed with media trucks, official vehicles -- and, as the day wore on, vans and hearses carrying funeral directors waiting to take away the dead.

“I don’t know who among my friends was in there,” said Silva, wearing dark sunglasses. “I don’t know, and I’m afraid.”

Raposa, a bass player, said he played The Station “maybe 500 times in my career,” first with a band called Strut, and then with God’s Little Joke.

“Everybody who goes there, they are the same people over and over,” he said. “They’re in that bar every day of their lives. It’s a hangout for the musical community around here.” On Friday, Raposa said, he fielded phone calls from friends as far away as London and Los Angeles -- musicians who played at The Station or friends who hung out there at one time or another.

For regulars at The Station, the place had a chummy feeling, Raposa said. If you didn’t know a person’s name, he explained, you surely recognized the face. “It was definitely a tight group, and I have no idea how many of my friends are missing,” Raposa said. “There are dozens and dozens missing right now and I don’t know where they are.” Normally, The Station would not have been as full as it was Thursday for the Great White show, Silva said.

“They had a lot of big-name, old bands, and it was really neat, because you could finally see them up close,” she said. “It was nice -- not like being in a big arena where you had to see the performers from far away.”

Raposa said his old band, Strut, held an annual reunion at The Station because the place meant so much to the musicians. He said he had been crying for almost 18 hours, since he first heard about the fire.

“Now I think I am empty of tears and just in shock mode,” he said. Raposa and Silva fell silent as a dozen local firefighters, their faces drawn and haggard, walked away from the site, where 96 bodies were found. Then spectators across from where The Station once stood broke into applause. Raposa and Silva joined in.Silva said later that she had planned to spend Saturday night at The Station, listening to her neighbor’s band, Rumors.

“We lost a lot of fun and a lot of history there,” she said, gazing wistfully across the street. “And we lost a lot of friends too.”