On the morning of Friday February 21st 2003 most of us woke up to the news and the images of a horrific fire that engulfed a nightclub killing 100 people. Images from the fire, ironically from a report that one of the owners was doing for a nightly newscast, show that the fire spread quickly and that the conditions inside the club, the overcrowding and the general confusion along with the hazardous flammable material inside the club created a raging inferno of fire and toxic smoke. In time it came to light that soundproofing used to appease the neighbors was the cause of the devastation, simple egg crates, any number of people who went to college would have been familiar with, and anyone with common sense would have known were flammable. There were no sprinklers at The Station, the fire exits were not kept up to code and the inspections if in fact they happened regularly, did not seem to happen with any kind of regard. In the days and weeks after the fire the descriptions of how most of the people perished came to light, and the scene described inside and at the front door where people were crushed against each other dying feet from the outside world are realities that are hard to fathom.
Perishing the way these people did was truly a tragedy and I can’t imagine how painful the thought of someone I love dying that way would be, but I can imagine and fathom the outrage and hatred I would feel knowing that although there was plenty of blame to go around no one took accountability or responsibility for it. The owners claimed ignorance, the inspectors claimed no negligence, and the law handed down a punishment as if the crime that was committed at The Station was irrelevant.
As Americans we want to believe in our justice system, we want to believe that the guilty will be punished and that the victims will be vindicated, if not during their life, at least in their death. We want to believe that people who don’t follow the rules, who cut corners, and feel no concern for actions that could cause harm to others pay for their blatant disregard. Yet more and more we are being faced with the reality that accountability and responsibility are not as important as the quick fix and the bottom line.
The Derderians are guilty; they are guilty of greed, guilty of not caring about the people that worked for them, the people who were their customers, their friends and their livelihood. They cared about their profits and this made them oblivious to the things they did that put others in danger because they never thought that there would be consequences to their actions. They killed 100 innocent people, and destroyed countless others lives, and the justice that should have fallen on the side of the lives destroyed burned them once again much like it did the night of February 20th. How a family member who lost one of their love ones could not be disillusioned is beyond me. It is insulting to those who died and to those they left behind that their lives and their painful deaths did not receive the closure they deserved, so that at least their deaths would not be in vein and that the guilty would pay and learn that their actions had consequences regardless of the fact that they did not plan or mean for it to happen. Listening today to the victims family, describing their loved ones, yet not allowed to direct their anger at the two men who ruined their lives, was heartbreaking and courageous, because it sickens me that the protection these two men were given to them by the court was more evident than the protection these two men provided to the people who died in their establishment.
