Slow recovery Six months after the Station disaster, moving on remains difficult for the individuals and establishments touched by the nightclub fire BY BRIAN C. JONES

SIX MONTHS LATER, Thom Cahir still has trouble visiting the site.

Cahir’s best friend, Mike Gonsalves, was among 100 people who perished at the Station in the calamitous fire that flashed through the West Warwick nightclub on February 20.

A popular disk jockey for radio station WHJY-FM, known as "Doctor Metal," Gonsalves, 40, had played Little League baseball with Cahir, now 41, when they were growing up in Providence’s Elmhurst section. They were roommates at Rhode Island College. Gonsalves was the best man at Thom and Ann Cahir’s wedding in 1987, then godfather to their oldest son.

Cahir’s doctor kept him out of work for more than two months after the fire, and in the first weeks, he just lay on his living room couch staring at the TV. At night, his dreams would pull him into the burning Station (he wasn’t at the fateful show), where he would try to rescue Gonsalves, failing every time and waking up, screaming.

The first time Cahir (pronounced "Carr") visited the West Warwick site, at the end of June, he located the makshift cross designated for Gonsalves among the 100 set up for all the victims, but then he fled. Later, he’d drive by, but his head would turn away.

The problem with this is that Cahir is president of The Station Memorial Foundation, which hopes to preserve the site in tribute to the victims.

How is he supposed to save the place if he can’t make himself go there?

Like Cahir, thousands of others remain under the spell of the Station disaster a half-year later.

Burn victims are still undergoing rehabilitation. Families of the dead and injured still must reach out for help with bills. Therapists continue to guide victims out of the despair left by tragedy. But even the helpers find themselves choking up, being so close to the bravery and suffering of the survivors.

A state grand jury remains in session, probing whether the fire, in addition to being a tragedy, was a crime. On August 17, the Boston Sunday Globe reported that defense lawyers think the state may be considering charging club owners Jeffrey and Michael Derderian, and Great White road manager Daniel Biechele with involuntary manslaughter. A spokesman for Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, speaking to the Phoenix, would say only that the investigation has passed the halfway mark.

One major issue is whether a similar event can be prevented.

The General Assembly and Governor Donald L. Carcieri crafted what they intended to be a model fire code, and now the question is how effective it will be.

At the same time, nightclubs, restaurants, and the other businesses that are the focus of these reforms are facing their own struggle for survival, faced with potentially enormous bills to meet the demands of the new fire code. Many businesses — but not all — will have to install expensive sprinkler systems; all of them will have to install alarms, and some will have to have extremely sophisticated safety devices.

Some business owners fear that they and their employees will be put out of operation. At the same time, many believe — as they did before the Station fire — that this enhanced regulation is needed. Their question is, how much is necessary and at what price?

So one of the awful aftershocks of the fire is an uncomfortable discussion of what human life — in dollars and cents — is worth.

THE PHONE woke Thom Cahir at his Cranston home. Why would anyone be calling at 6:15 a.m.? It was Ann, his wife, who usually left for work much earlier than he did. She was calling from the car. "Turn on the TV, now," Ann said.

The screen was an inferno. The Station, a roadhouse that went through numerous incarnations before becoming a draw for tribute bands and past-their-prime metal acts, had erupted into flames during a Great White concert. Since this is the Video Age, a TV camera documented the start of the blaze. Although fireworks had previously been used at the venue without incident, sparks from the band’s fireworks display — a "gerb" that was too strong for the club’s relatively low ceiling and highly flammable soundproofing — ignited the building.

First, a few of those at the Station were feared dead. Then 20. Just when the viewer’s mind had gotten used to one number, the next update would double it — a cascade of casualties impossible to comprehend until the figure settled weeks later at the savagely round mark of 100. About 350 persons were believed to have been in the nightclub. In addition to the one hundred who died, 200 were injured and 50 got out without a major injury. Fifty-six children lost a parent in the fire.

Cahir was focused on just one person, Michael J. Gonsalves, the DJ who introduced Great White. The news said Gonsalves was missing.

Cahir’s phone rang constantly with calls from mutual friends. Early in the afternoon, hope rolled with the report that someone had seen Gonsalves outside the nightclub after the fire started. So maybe he was at a hospital, unconscious.

But in the back channel way that Rhode Islanders sometimes get the early word, a police officer friend called later. He’d talked to a West Warwick officer, who said one of the bodies inside was tentatively identified as Mike’s by a gold chain and cross.

Cahir had a key to Gonsalves’s house and drove there with a friend. There were 50 messages on the answering machine, and Cahir listened to all of them. Some of the same voices had phoned two and three times, everyone hoping desperately that The Doctor was in.

AT A TIME when government and most institutions, whether they be the media or the church, are viewed with contempt, Rhode Island distinguished itself in responding to the Station fire. Carcieri compassionately guided the state through the early days, directing state social workers to counsel victims, making sure horribly burned bodies were quickly identified.

The United Way of Southeastern New England, and then the Rhode Island Foundation, oversaw fund-raising that collected more than $3 million from more than 6000 donors. The money spent so far includes $422,086 paid for funerals. Hundreds of thousands more has gone to help pay mortgages and utility bills. The private Family Services agency was hired to work with survivors and victims’ families.

Medical bills are enormous, but appear to be covered largely by federal-state Medicaid or private insurance, despite early fears that hospitals might have to provide millions in free care. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island estimates it will pay $4.5 million to $9 million for about 30 of its subscribers injured.

Kent County Memorial Hospital in Warwick and Rhode Island Hospital in Providence treated 135 patients. But spokespersons said that money was not their major concern. "Our mission is to provide care to people regardless of their ability to pay," says Nicole Gustin, a spokeswoman for Rhode Island Hospital. "To us, the real cost is the human element."

Jane A. Hayward, the social worker by training who heads the vast state Department of Human Services, says she’s never seen a better response to a crisis during her 30 years in state government. "We often look, as Rhode Islanders, at our image in a very negative way," Hayward says. "But I think this was our shining hour."

Darrell M. West, a Brown University expert on Rhode Island politics, agrees:

"I think Rhode Island government looks very effective in how it handled this disaster."

In fact, the General Assembly, beset by a sex harassment scandal months earlier, convened serious and professional hearings. In the preamble to the law that resulted, legislators said they intended the statute as a memorial to the victims, so that, "Rhode Island will never again be the place of such a tragedy."

The law tries to correct the several lapses that converged in the Station disaster. It restricts fireworks, banning them from small buildings. It revokes the grandfather clause that exempted many older establishments from regulations enacted after the businesses started. A key reform will require some older buildings to install sprinkler systems.

The law sets up a new category of "special amusement buildings" that have liquor licenses, entertainment licenses, or both. If these establishments have capacities for 150 or more customers, they need sprinklers. But cognizant of the impact on small businesses, such as restaurants, the General Assembly carved out exceptions. If a so-called "Class C" establishment of (50 to 300 customers) fits the "special amusement" definition, but is considered "less concentrated," with 15 square feet for each customer, it’s exempt.

All buildings must have fire alarms. Some have to be wired into municipal fire departments. All special amusement buildings with "concentrated" occupancy must have alarms that will sound, turn on emergency lights, and kill "competing" sounds such as PA systems.

The law is complicated and can’t be understood by a layman without an expert guide. Further, regulations putting it into effect are still being hammered out by the state’s Fire Safety Code Board of Appeal and Review. Thomas B. Coffey, executive director of the Fire Safety Code Board, told the Phoenix he hopes the new regulations will be in effect by November.

There is an important hitch, Coffey said. New national standards may recommend a lower occupancy threshold for existing buildings — 100 occupants instead of 150. The Safety Board in the next few weeks will recommend to the governor and legislature whether those should be adopted in Rhode Island.

Late in July, state Fire Marshal Irving J. Owens shocked a large gathering of the Rhode Island Hospitality and Tourism Association when he acknowledged that he did not yet have answers to questions of how the code will affect them.

Dale J. Venturini, president of the association, which has 600 members, said she was surprised about the uncertainty of when the final rules will be out — and she was a member of the commission that crafted the new law.

Lieutenant Governor Charles J. Fogarty, who served on the fire study panel, says the state needs to assure businesses they have up-to-date information on what will be required, an area that, he says, needs "significant improvement."

Coffey, of the Safety Board, says that if the time frame for release of the final regulations and the schedules for complying with them turn out to be unrealistic, they can be extended.

GONSALVES’S NICKNAME for Cahir was "Dad," and he cooked it up long before Thom and Ann were married and had their two boys, Ian and Dylan. It went back to when Thom and Mike and a third man, Frank Murphy, shared an off-campus apartment at Rhode Island College in the 1980s (the same period that one of the Station owners, Jeffrey Derderian, was at RIC). Cahir was the only one with a checkbook, so he paid the rent, utility, and other bills — a role to Mike that spelled "Dad."

Mike and Thom grew up in Elmhurst section and played on the same youth baseball team, where Mike’s talent for sports showed up as a shortstop. And his penchant for verbal tirades emerged, too. Thom remembers Mike bawling out the team’s adult coaches when they gave the tiny players what Mike considered the wrong advice on a play.

Mike’s friends relished his outbursts against perceived injustices. In college, Mike was supposed to take a "senior seminar." The first day, the professor announced that as part of the learning experience, the students would be teaching themselves. Mike erupted: Teach ourselves? You’re the teacher. You get paid to teach us. Mike was asked to leave, and took the class the next semester.

After graduation in 1986, Gonsalves was always there for Cahir, enthusiastic, emotive, hilarious, obsessed with music and sports. Sometimes, when Thom was watching a football game on TV, Mike would call from where he was watching the same game, gloating that his team had just scored and Thom’s was already finished, even though it was the first quarter.

When Gonsalves got his radio gig, carving out his identity as Doctor Metal, he was on the air from midnight to 5 a.m.; Cahir worked afternoons and evenings at the Providence Journal, writing obituaries and business briefs. But every Friday morning, Cahir would go over to Providence’s Foxy Lady strip club, where Mike handled DJ chores for the "Legs and Eggs" morning shows, founded so third-shift workers wouldn’t be deprived of their cultural opportunities. Thom would sit with Mike up in the sound booth, where ESPN’s SportsCenter was on the TV screen, and they’d talk sports and the latest news about Dad’s kids.

The last time Cahir saw Gonsalves was at The Foxy. Gonsalves was excited because he was going to be introducing Great White a few weeks later at the Station — a relatively high-profile show. He wanted Cahir to meet him at the club, where he’d introduce him to the band. But Cahir was scheduled to have a colonoscopy, a routine but burdensome cancer test that Ann Cahir, a registered nurse, insisted he get. Gonsalves didn’t argue. He considered Ann his "stepmother," and understood that no meant no.

So Cahir might have been at the Station. He should have been there. One grim list or another should have included the name of Thomas A. Cahir III.