There’s a fine line between finding scapegoats (unhelpful) and doling out an appropriate penalty to the individual(s) who bore the brunt of the responsibility for the tragedy by knowingly profiting from illegal and unsafe conditions. (If such a person exists, that is. Something for the legal system to determine.)
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Wow. That video was intense. It only took a few minutes for the club to become engulfed and the FD response was super fast (they were there within like 5 minutes.) I remember reading later that the insulation that caught fire was urethane foam – not only is it super flammable, but one of the byproducts of combustion is hydrogen cyanide which can kill you really fast.
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Take responsibility for your own safety, people! Your affordable housing can be made safe by you for very little money, if you realize that this is important to you. One can buy lighted EXIT signs as the same salvage shop where one buys old organs and mannequins. They may need half an hour of repair work. A bit of thought can go a long way towards ensuring the safety of all occupants of any building.
Unfortunately, most people only realize this fact after losing a loved one to a fire.
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They’re usually dumpster diving. Less safety equipment there.
Plus vintage signs would be pricier than new ones!
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Punishments are not always helpful. If we make an example of Ion, who probably bears the most blame, why not also give the same punishment to every manager of dangerous spaces. Pretty soon you have a ‘headlight out’ tool for capricious application of unevenly enforced laws. Just because this situation played out for the worst doesn’t mean that punishment is needed.
If you throw a party in an unsafe space and thirty people die, you are not just going to go on with your life as if nothing happened.
Not in California, anyway.
Maybe get a vintage exit sign with some tritium for that extra bit of danger.
Not everyone living in an art scene warehouse has the money to do that. In fact, almost no one does. Sprinkler systems are a minimum of $30,000.
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I’m East Bay too. A friend of mine’s girlfriend died in that fire (and she was a friend of many at my hackerspace).
I love the assholes in this thread armchair quarterbacking this whole thing with a tone of lofty disdain.
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Everyone has already been punished by the reality of the situation and will carry the natural consequences for the rest of their lives. Tragedy is a bigger wake up call than fines or jail. For anyone who isn’t a psychopath.
I’m honestly not convinced that Derick Ion Almena isn’t a psychopath. (Or possibly a sociopath.) As I said earlier it’s up to the legal system to determine any criminal culpability, but it sure sounds like he wasn’t very concerned about the safety or well-being of others. He made that infamous Facebook post hours after the fire lamenting his personal loss of “everything he worked so hard for” without voicing any concern for the victims. Even giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he had somehow not heard about the likely fatalities at the time, he certainly knew that a huge fire had engulfed the venue he had rented out for a crowded concert. Injuries in that scenario are incredibly likely. What kind of sicko puts out self-pitying comments after such an event without including at least a token “I hope and pray that nobody was seriously hurt” in there somewhere?
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I hope that’s not intended as an excuse. There’s no reason to hold a party in a deathtrap. If it was too expensive to bring the deathtrap up to code, then it should have been shuttered. Full stop.
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Yup.
The residents were doing what they could; no smoking indoors, no candles, incense tightly restricted, alarms and portable extinguishers.
But it wasn’t enough.
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Don’t worry, a bunch of know it all’s here will second guess it anyway.
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Below are a couple of (unfortunately very rare) decent accounts of this senseless tragedy. That space was not typical of most unsanctioned, underground environments - (which do often fall sort of the strict letter of code compliance, but yet can still be maintained basic, common-sense levels of safety, (extinguishers, exits, stairs)). This place represented a categorically different level of sketchiness and incompetence with all the (clearly extensive) efforts of it’s makers being given to form and precious little to essential function.
We lost so many who were so good and had so much more to give and to live - we need new ideas now.
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I love talking fire safety (this is not a joke), but we’ve all been to places like that. Some of us had a hand in building places like that. It’s easy to get carried away with building something beautiful, and damn the abstract risk.
Damn right. Living in a dangerous space is one thing. Hosting a concert in a dangerous space is entirely different, and the height of irresponsibility.
I am not an armchair quarterback. I ran a party house for a couple years in the eighties, with the place jam-packed with kids watching bands play. People did not get hurt. I am currently the lead mentor of a robotics club that does fun things like build and operate a trebuchet.
I know a thing or two about safety. The proprietor of this place didn’t. If he did, the tragedy would not have occurred.
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There’s a fire station literally around the corner from the Ghost Ship. (And, ironically, also a company that makes fire extinguishers.) So in that sense, the surrounding buildings were lucky that the fire department was right there and the fire didn’t spread. Of course, good public policy shouldn’t be based on luck.
Good for you? Yes, let’s make it about you. You are armchair quarterbacking because this thing doesn’t affect you at all and you’re pontificating about it in the abstract.
Who cares that you ran a party house 30 years ago? This wasn’t a party house. It was an art collective in an Oakland warehouse. You don’t even know our community around here or what their lives are like, do you? I have multiple friends living in similar spaces for a variety of reasons. I’m sure you’d tsk them for their life choices too and pontificate over them if they were killed for them?
I’m more interested in how our local community is grieving, not assigning shame and blame at the moment.
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Mod note: Deep breaths. Relax. And no victim blaming.
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