goddam government regulations |
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| By: Elliott Monday January 28, 2013 1:37 pm | |
There was no fire alarm. There were no sprinklers or fire escapes. And when a band member tried to put out a fire that had been started by pyrotechnics, the extinguisher didn’t work.
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9 Comments
You remember the Rhode Island fire…
For those who don’t: The singer set of pyrotechnics during a show, the flammable stuff burned, limited exit ability, too many people dead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire
yes – how can we forget that horror!
Can’t believe any band anywhere playing small venues would risk this catastrophe – especially with modern LED lights and the computers to time them
an unspeakable and really unforgivable tragedy, normanb. I read today that HALF the victims went to the same college at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria. Can you even imagine!
So, Elliott, how do we get the people who don’t want health and safety regulations to start wanting them?
Does the economy need to break down yet further before people see?
Unfortunately, tragedies like this one, sad to say.
Such is the nature of reactive vs proactive problem solving (unless ALEC is involved). Any regulation of anything is sure to gore
someone’ssome interest group’s ox.You know, my first reaction to this was, “Wait, we’ve been here before! Didn’t they know about the Rhode Island club?”
And then I realized that it’s very likely neither the owners nor the band ever heard of it. The locations are very far apart geographically, and probably every one involved is too young to have been paying attention anyway.
It often seems to me that the wheel must be reinvented every generation or two, because people don’t pay attention to history. I’d include the vaccine panics, too. The parents who think the chance of a bad vaccine reaction would be worse than the illness — polio, whooping cough, measles, mumps, chicken pox– think so because they’re too young to have experienced the pre-vaccine days. They have no memory of epidemics of children becoming paralyzed or dying from these preventable diseases, and now that the diseases are so rare, they can’t “get” the emotional response to the dread parents of pre-vaccine years had to the discovery of a way to prevent those things.
A-yup. Can’t get my neices, nephews or grandchildren to realize what it waas like when we (in Michigan, 1960′s, IIRC — at least, within my memory) had Help Wanted in four categories: Male, Female, Colored Male, Colored Female. Abortions were induced/done with coathangers, quinine was also popular, ditto repeated jumping off chairs or ladders, or by failed med students in grotty apartments.
Legislation, regulation, so important. Changes our lives, then our children, or theirs, forget.
Well, yes, but what is even more
unfortunatefucked up is that there are people who, even in the face of preventable tragedy just like this, still don’t want any regulations or oversight at all. Tsunami warning systems comes to mind.