Well… no, sparklers didn’t set a wooden ceiling on fire. They set “egg-crate” polyurethane foam soundproofing on fire. Just like what happened at The Station fire in Rhode Island. That type of foam is extremely flammable and burns hotter than wood burns. While burning it releases not only toxic gases but gases that are, themselves, also flammable.
It wasn’t temporary decorations that caught fire, it was foam intended for insulation that was installed improperly. This is easy to see because, due to flammability, such foam is always supposed to be covered by something else and not left exposed in that manner. Because it’s so [expletive deleted] flammable.
It really is outrageous that the age or potential of intoxication of the victims here has gotten more than a passing mention. This place was a death trap, and I would be surprised if middle-aged and sober adults would have faired much better. Not only did the exposed foam installation catch fire and spread rapidly, it was visibly melting and raining down like molten rain on the victims.
I think the age of the victims was more in the sense of the deaths being particularly tragic in the that the lives of such young people were cut short.
And nobody has said (that I’ve heard of, anyway) that the victims did anything wrong by drinking in a bar on New Years’ Eve (in a country where the drinking age is 16). The fact is mainly relevant in that it may have slowed people’s reaction times down.
But again, it was a bar.
Indeed. To quote a judge (likely from LA Law) - “An intoxicated person has just as much right, and possibly more need, to protection under the law.”
It sounds so much like the MGM Grand fire. The fire spread across the casino floor at over 13 mph! It was so fast people died at their slot machines. You can’t blame the victims in either fire. Nor in the Ghost Ship fire, which was all on the fact the place was a death trap, and not on people who were having a good time and trusted the owners.
Newer reports:
- 20 of the 40 fatalities were minors. It is alleged that the bar was known by teenagers as the go-to spot turning a blind eye. (looking at Swiss sources the drinking age in Valais canton is 16 for beer/18 for spirits; people under 16 years in a bar must be in the company of a parent or guardian after 22 o’clock.)
- The bar owners are being investigated for involuntary manslaughter and now, after a first interview by prosecutors, the husband (but apparently not his wife) has been arrested on the grounds of flight risk.
The sparklers set fire to a suspended, cheap, highly flammable foam mat used for acoustic insulation. Nowhere was it claimed that a wooden ceiling had burned; there wasn’t one.
Intoxication is not the point. People would have been killed in this fire stone sober.
There is a Netflix movie about a very similar fire in Brazil in 2013 “The endless night” where you can see exactly the same kind of foam suspended from the ceiling starting to burn and melt down onto the dancers in a disco. It seems nobody has learnt from this catastrophe where hundreds of people died, what a shame.
That’s true, but it wouldn’t help matters.
Plenty of people have learned. At the same time, in much of the world building codes don’t exist, or are unenforced. And greedy scofflaws are everywhere. Dirty money beats morality every time. And works great until it doesn’t.
No matter the punishment meted out to the owners of this firetrap, another thousand just like it exist all over the world. And not one of those will close because its owner suddenly got religion about the risks they’re running. “It won’t happen to me” is justification enough to continue.
Perhaps, though, the fire department inspector there or elsewhere will be prompted to visit similar establishments in search of similar acoustic insulation. Or perhaps a patron or employee of one of these places will notice the issue and alert the owners. We might never know, of course, if the same issue somewhere else is quietly corrected. But I hope that the occurrence of similar incidents can be reduced.
I certainly expected better from the building inspectors & fire marshals of a country like Switzerland.
IMO commerce and society can sorta be divided into the honest folks who follow all the rules and accept the costs of that as just a legit cost of business or of living in the society. Then there are the pirates who view 100% of that stuff as crap to be ignored or bribed around or …
In some parts of the world and in some industries, the pirates are so numerous it’s almost impossible to stay in business honestly; you can’t outcompete the pirate’s lower costs. In other parts of the world or other industries, pirates are rare enough that honesty can prevail almost universally despite the pirates creaming off some small fraction of the total available revenue in highly profitable fashion.
Much like assholes at parties, if there’s just one, crowd pressure shuts them up. But once there’s a few for mutual reinforcement, their behavior ends up setting the agenda for everyone.
The parallels to current changes in US politics and US business regulation hardly need mentioning. The pirates are making their run to become the new norm.
Actually, I was thinking the same thing. I expected better from the Swiss.
I’m thinking of the saying, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
Or how we hear(d) people say, “Yeah, well Sally died from COVID and she was vaccinated.”
Like so many other categories, I’d presume that this is an area in which the Swiss are statistically better than we are, but perfection is a pretty unobtainable goal when the human element is involved.
Can you please stop this? Yes, it was a bar, people were drinking alcohol, likely some people were intoxicated. That has nothing to do with the tragedy here. The uncovered flammable foam insulation does. Passing any blame onto the patrons is pretty offensive.
This.
One aspect is not being given enough attention here: the Swiss system consists of different cantons. In some of these cantons, fire protection is handled by the building insurance company, which has a vested interest in fire protection measures. This insurance is mandatory. However, there are cantons that handle this differently, where fire safety is managed by the municipality, as is the case in the canton of Valais. In the often very small communities, everyone knows each other, and the fire safety inspector may be well acquainted with the owner of a restaurant. This constellation is problematic. In the case of the bar that burned down, the mandatory annual inspection had not been carried out since 2019, and the second emergency exit had been locked, presumably to prevent people from leaving without paying their bills. However, the regulations do not mention anything about highly flammable material on the ceiling, so even if the inspection had been carried out, the insulation foam would probably not have been objected to. Now everything is supposed to change, bars will be inspected, etc. The municipality of Crans Montana does not have enough money to treat and compensate the victims, nor does the couple who run the bar. The liability insurance will not pay because the regulations were not observed (emergency exit, width of the stairs, which was made narrower by the operator). The victims may end up empty-handed.
Yes, we expect more from Switzerland, but even there, they are only human.
Quite right. The Swiss are only human too.
As to this …
Yeah. Small towns the world over are prone to that. All those complicated regulations come from those big city folks and we’re just much more relaxed and sensible out here. And besides: the building owner is my neighbor and we’re pals who drink together at the other bar in town.