Hardship lingers in aftermath of blaze

This is a grim week in Rhode Island. Friday marks the first anniversary of the horrific blaze at the Station, a small club where the pyrotechnics at a Great White concert got out of control with nightmarish results. That night, the flames, smoke and crowd-crush killed dozens and left dozens more injured. The death toll would eventually reach 100.

There is plenty of grief, sympathy and pain tied to the anniversary, but there is also anger and desperation. There is a fear that the fire that was extinguished in West Warwick last year may destroy more lives in the months to come.

“It was a good, long glimpse at hell. It still seems like yesterday and it still haunts me,” says Todd King, who was at the Station that night and now works with the Station Family Fund, a group that is finding it harder and harder to raise money for a tragedy that is still unfolding.

“A lot of the injured people that night have ended up homeless, and a lot of people who got injured or are in the families of the people who got killed, they are going to end up homeless soon,” he says. “There are 64 children who lost one or both parents in the fire.” King’s group is paying the rents right now of 20 families, but the fund is scraping for money. There are several events this week in the Rhode Island area they hope will resuscitate their efforts. The group’s website is https://www.stationfamilyfund.org. Its phone number is (401) 821-2149.

As of the start of 2004, the group had raised $207,000 and so far has distributed $191,000. “Every dime, every single cent, goes to the charity, all of it,” said King, who is clearly bitter that many of the public donations made in the early months went to organizations that cannot make the same claim. There’s another matter that angers King: He is a devoted rock fan, which made him like most everyone else at the Station.

“These were real fans of music, and this was the worst disaster in the history of music. There were 200 people severely injured, and these burns and injuries are not like a broken arm or something. And the mainstream music scene? Nothing, we never heard from them. If there’s a famine in another country or a forest fire, there’s a CD or benefit concert in a week. Here, their fans, people who died in their concert shirts, needed them and still need them. They could raise, in one show, what we have raised in a year of grunt work. Shame on them.”