If you watch this video - YouTube you can see that in only a couple minutes the place is engulfed in flames and anyone in there would be burned alive. The question I have is the thick smoke that was in there was it enough to kill them before the fire took over a couple minutes later? The strange thing also is that as the camera man is outside you can hear a woman screaming “help me” at 5:38 I cant tell if it’s from inside or outside, but at that point the smoke inside is very thick, is it possible they were alive at that point?
My observations:
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The camera guy was very smart. It seems like almost right after the pyrotechnics went off, he was getting the fuck out of there. One of the youtube comments say that he was shooting the footage for a safety video, so obviously he knew he was in an unsafe situation.
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The video underscores why there’s maximum occupancy limits and mandatory fire exits, etc. for buildings. It seems like there were just two exits and clearly they were not enough. All it takes is for asphyxiation to wipe out a few people in a (literal) choke point and then you’ve got a ton of people who are trapped and burned alive.
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The video reminds me how fragile life is. One moment everyone was having fun. Six minutes later, it’s the end of their world. And that fire spread very rapidly. You really do just have seconds. I hope I remember this the next time the fire alarm goes off at work.
I think many died of smoke inhalation, and probably not a few died of positional asphyxiation in the crush at the front door.
Full NIST report is available for free from this site. Unfortunately the report includes this line:
This article from 2012 supports my claim - most died from smoke inhalation, some from the main-exit stampede. No cite is provided.
I did find this post, which claims:
-86 died from smoke inhalation
-3 died from burns and/or inhalation (indeterminate?)
-3 died from inhalation and compression injury
-4 burned to death
-1 died from compression injuries alone
The link he refers to requires registration, so I’m taking this guy at his word.
The interesting thing is that there were numerous exits from the club (see diagrams at Wikipedia), but most people reflexively headed for the front entrance, the one where everyone had entered in the first place. Which points to one takeaway lesson: the next time you enter a building, make a mental note of where the available exits are. In the event of an actual fire, pause for a second and consider which exit is the best option; it might not be the door where you came in, especially if that’s where EVERYONE else is headed.
How would they know the cause of deaths of the people? I would think the fire would damage the bodies bad enough to make it hard to tell how they died (or even cremate them)
if the lungs aren’t burnt up then autopsy can show smoke inhalation.
What if they breathed in smoke then burned to death a minute later?
Not really. The fire was over in 5.5 minutes, with most of the heat being generated above the bodies (burning walls/ceiling), and moving upward from there. Some victims may have had third degree burns on upward/outward facing surfaces, but that’d be about it. Complete cremation takes a couple of hours of high heat applied directly to the body in a carefully designed furnace.
Assuming a body hasn’t been cremated, this is where medical examiners do their thing. Consider a body with:
no (or not much) smoke residue in the lungs
No (or not much) burnt skin
was found at the bottom of a pile of people
six broken ribs and a punctured lung
Can you guess the cause of death?
On the other hand, a victim with lots of smoke residue in the lungs/nose/mouth and cyanide in the bloodstream (from the burning foam) and no other visible injuries is pretty surely a death from smoke inhalation.
And so on.
Forensic examiners are trained in that kind of thing. People have corpses exhumed (after embalming and being buried for years/decades) to check a theory on cause of death.
The thing is there was very thick smoke that I’m sure everyone there inhaled a lot of, then all of a certain the whole place bust into flames, likely burning anyone still in there. A part of me wonders if they are saying smoke inhalation as the main cause of death to make it easier for the family.
From the damage to the lungs, you’d be able to tell if they breathed in enough smoke to be fatal or not.
As for lying to make the families feel better, likely not. The purpose of looking at causes of death in situations like this is to understand what happened, and prevent it from happening again. If making the families feel better were a priority, it wold make more sense simply not to do the report in the first place, rather than deliberately create one with errors in it.
The whole stampede to the front phenomenon is apparent in the video because you see that both side doors are wide open and no one is using them. Tragic. Also, you can see how thick the smoke is all the way to about a foot above the floor. A good example of why you should stay low, very low.
The thing that really strikes me about this video is that apart from once at about 6:25, you never see anyone actually burning or dying. And yet you know that they’re right there, burning, choking, and getting crushed. Something like 100 people. The first sirens are heard around 4:30, only about 4 minutes after the first flames. But way too late.
Were the windows boarded up or barred? I wonder why some folks didn’t chuck a chair through them.
Some people were found in the restrooms; they probably found a door and assumed it was an exit. The windows were not big enough to climb out of, even if they were broken.
This happened the same week as the Columbia disaster, and footage from both gave me the same feeling: People having the time of their lives, none of them knowing that their life expectancy could be measured in minutes. 
One of the Station casualties was a band member, who left behind a pregnant girlfriend.
“Burned to death” is actually pretty hard to do. You can torch somebody’s skin for quite a long time before their heart stops beating (probably due to, what, overheating? Blood loss from rupture of major blood vessels when the tissue damage gets REALLY deep?). If they’re being exposed to that much heat, it’s far more likely that at some point they will inhale superheated air that sears their alveoli and prevents oxygen exchange with their blood, resulting in a relatively quick death due to (secondary) hypoxia.
People do die from severe burns, but it’s usually later on at the hospital, when they succumb to infections that set in because large amounts of their skin is gone.
Oh come on everybody. What you’re all simply trying to ask, vicariously, morbidly, (right?) is what gruesome unthinkable agony some of them suffered as they burned alive, even while horribly coughing their kishkes out breathing super-fiery-hot lung-searing caustic poison gas as they flopped on the floor like grounded fish while a herd of buffalo stampeded over them. Regardless of which of those bodily insults actually finally killed them.
Same as that thread a few days ago about soldiers in tanks getting incinerated alive when their tank is hit by armor-piercing fire-power.
ETA: Yes, people have been morbidly, gruesomely fascinated with being burned alive (preferably when it happens to someone else) since, like, forever.
At 6:19 it looks like someone runs out of there on fire, how’s it possible he was alive at that point with all the smoke in their? How long does it usually take someone to die from smoke inhalation?
Thanks for sharing this video. I watched with the sound off because for things like this, I always find sounds to be far more shocking, haunting and unbearable than the visuals. I had no idea about this fire and this amazing once-in-a-lifetime footage.
It really reminds you that in a fire like this you have mere seconds to realize “holy fuck get the fuck out of here RIGHT NOW.” You don’t have minutes. In a minute or two, you will be trapped and in another minute or two, dead.
After exploring Youtube for a while there was a really touching 7 part youtube documenatry that was made where they spoke to victims and surviving family of those who died. I highly recommend everyone watch it.
That being said, to answer the question, many people in these sorts of situations die from compressive asphyxiation, also known as “crowd crush.” That is to say, the crowd gets so thick and there is so much pressure on you that you literally cannot breathe. The air is forced from your lungs and you suffocate.
This fire happened so quickly though because of the foam that many probably did die from smoke inhalation very quickly.
It is very very important that if you are in a crowded area where people are packed shoulder to shoulder, you are putting your life at risk. People can panic and stampede for almost any reason or no reason at all, and it can result in huge amounts of death and injury due to crowd crush and trampling.
That being said, in the documentary I watched, there were at least two people who managed to survive who said that the bouncer near the stage exit was actually telling people they had to use a different exit, even though they knew the place was on fire, because it was “club policy.” Horrible people with terrible judgment.
Actually, I think the cameraman did, in fact, go out a side door along with a few other people. You can hear people saying “don’t push!” and see how everyone is shoved together as he does so. After he got out he had to run around the side of the building to reach the front with the human log jam. Then later he goes back to the door he used and calls out, asking if anyone is still inside. By that time the hallway looks like the inside of a furnace.
I think there were boards over the window. You can see people trying to break through them from the outside and as I recall they did manage to get through one of them, but by then it was too late for most inside.
There were several people at the entrance trying to pull people out of the human crush earlier in the video, it’s possible Man on Fire was one of those guys who stayed a little too long trying to rescue people and his clothing caught fire. To me, that seems more plausible than someone running, upright, out of the building at that point.
I’m almost certain that’s the only possibility.
Very sad to see those poor people crushed in the front door stacked 3 or 4 rows high.
Just wanted to add that those guys at the front doors did manage to rescue a few people - some years back the New England Journal of Medicine had an article about one of the injured survivors. She had been stuck in the doorway crush and was one of the last people pulled out of it to safety.
Read “Killer Show” for a complete analysis of what happened. Yes, it is amazing how fast the fire spread-thanks to the illegally-applied foam insulation on the walls-which one fire expert compared to “painting the walls with gasoline”. As soon as the flames erupted, you had about 2 minutes (max) to get out of there. How the cameraman made it out is mazing. The amazing and sad thing is that the Station fire was an almost exact replay of the Coconut Grove fire in Boston , in which 429 people died.