Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 26, 1990 TAG: 9003262282
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: KEVIN FLYNN AND MICHAEL POWELL NEWSDAY
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
He heard wood crackling and popping. There were no screams, no sobs, no one in sight. It snapped like a bonfire and Reyes felt sick.
"It was the sound of death," he said.
He bounded off the truck, cradling a power saw. Then he was inside the social club, clambering up a staircase so claustrophobic just one person could pass at a time.
He fell to his knees on the second floor, groping his way into a swirling blackness of smoke and night. The floor beneath him felt "like wet, smoldering cardboard."
Reyes paused in the retelling Sunday morning, his face ashen beneath a mask of soot.
"Then I realized that entire floor was human beings, I was crawling across dozens of bodies," the firefighter whispered.
It was a night of horror in the Bronx. A place of pulsing salsa and steamy exhaltation was a smoldering ruin, the letters on the Happy Land sign obliterated where furnace-like heat and fire blew 6-foot holes in the second-floor wall.
For Reyes, it was the silence in the club that clung like smoke to memory, and that floor, and the young men and women lying twisted and fused. They were still clothed in Saturday night colors, leather pants and silken miniskirts.
For Omar Teruel, it was the memory of leaving moments earlier. Of turning around three blocks away and seeing the sky lit by flames, with the knowledge that two friends were inside the club.
From these and other recollections, including those of police, fire officials and witnesses, emerge the story of the death of 87 people. Their death faces would be photographed, the images taken to a nearby school, where relatives would identify them and begin to grieve.
The social club was at full throttle when Carl Williamson arrived at 3 a.m. A syncopated reggae beat throbbed in the pit of his stomach as Williamson shouldered through the downstairs crowd, his ears buzzing with the roar of four dozen men and women drinking, talking, laughing. It was his birthday and he had insisted that the party adjourn from his apartment to this red stucco-faced club on Southern Boulevard.
Upstairs, a disc jockey spun reggae, salsa and calypso records, and about 70 people crowded a trembling dance floor that was 12 feet wide and 52 feet deep. Strobes cut light shafts through air thick with cigarette smoke.
One dancer, Ricardo Stine, recalls a wild scene, as dancers flung themselves back and forth. Moments later, a man would flick a cigarette at Stine and Stine would grab his sister, Elizabeth, and suggest that they leave.
"Man, if not for getting angry at that guy, we would've both been dead," he said.
Accounts differ on what happened around 3:15 a.m. Apparently, a bearded, thick-chested man with long hair got into an argument with the downstairs bouncer. Fingers were pointed, pushes and threats exchanged. It apparently was an argument over a woman.
"He [the bearded man] was yelling, `Don't push me, don't push me,' " recalled Teruel. And as the man stumbled out the door into the night, Teruel recalled that he added, "I'll be back."
Upstairs, reggae had yielded to salsa and couples twisted and hugged in hot lambada dance steps.
Police say the bearded man - later identified as Julio Gonzalez of the Bronx - returned to the club around 3:35 a.m., carrying an antifreeze can filled with gasoline. Without a word, he stood at the left door and splashed a thick carpet of liquid across the downstairs floor and wall. Then, police say, he set it aflame.
The club lit up like a funeral pyre. Flames raced across the floor and exploded up the stairs. The two front doors acted as fans, sucking in air to fuel the flames. Bars covered the windows.
Upstairs, it took longer, a minute or more, fire officials say. There were screams and several dozen young people rushed for a door already obscured by smoke. There were no windows upstairs.
Within seconds, the heat was like that of a cauldron, the air kinetic with heat and smoke. What next happened is both clinically simple and chilling.
"Lungs are seared by the hot gases, and it becomes impossible to take a second breath," said Dr. Alexander Kuehl, director of emergency medicine at New York Hospital. "And when there is not enough oxygen coming in to feed the fire, you get carbon monoxide, which can kill you in a minute."
Deadly cyanide gas is also released in such fires.
"It was a huge rush of superheated poison gas. We call it `flashover,' it is instant. If you are breathing in, it is deadly," added Zachary Goldfarb, Emergency Medical Services deputy chief of operations.
Both officials speculated that death for those in the club came instantly and thus, perhaps, painlessly. The bodies layered four deep by the upstairs door, however, suggest panic and pain. A sprinkler system was in place but firefighters say that by the time it started spraying water, everyone was dead.
Ladder Co. 58 was seven blocks from the social club, answering another call, when word crackled over the radio of the fire at the social club.
Firefighter Frank Curtin, 47, hit the sirens and twisted the steering wheel. They reached the burning building within three minutes. One or two people on the street came running, telling the firefighters: There are people, lots of people inside.
"People were screaming; they were all burned," said Rosemary Green, who found the club in flames when she arrived. "Once you got in the entrance there was no way to get out."
The firefighters reported hearing no screams. "There were no sounds coming from inside the building," firefighter Reyes said. "Usually there are screams. All we heard was an explosive . . . a lot of crackling wood."
Reyes took his whining power saw to the roof of the club, carving holes through which poured thick billows of acrid black smoke. Meanwhile, Lt. Richard Biddles and firefighters Richie Hardin and Dennis Devlin and Thomas Mulligan, shot hundreds of pounds of water at the arching flames.
"It was like a blowtorch, it consumed half the sidewalk," said Devlin.
The flames down, Biddles, Hardin and Devlin plunged forward. Two charred bodies lay in the downstairs doorway. Seventeen more were scattered across the first floor. "It was an unbelievable situation," Devlin said. " `My God,' you said to yourself."
Devlin's buddy, Mulligan, shook his head in disbelieving agreement. "You see the first body, and you say . . . `you didn't get there fast enough,' " he said.
"Then you see the second body, and the third body, and the fourth body, and after that, you can't talk anymore. There is nothing to say."
On the second floor, they felt the soft floor, covered with bodies.
"They looked like mannequins," Reyes recalled. "Bodies were fused together, men and women, lying next to each, holding each other, lying on top of each other, arm in arm."
Farther from the door there were men in neat Afros, women with their hair coiffed, high heels and miniskirts. They lay beneath tables, legs tangled, hands wrapped around beer bottles.
"If you didn't know better, it was like they were sleeping," said Assistant Fire Chief Anthony De Vita with the citywide fire command. "That's how peaceful they were."
For the firefighters, however, it was a scene from a lower circle of hell. "I was dazed, devastated," said Reyes. "I just kept thinking to myself it was a bad dream."
For firefighter Curtin, the fire transported him 20 years and 12,000 miles away. "It gave me flashbacks to Vietnam. It's very strange. It's the first time it ever happened." Curtin was stationed in the Mekong Delta in 1966-1967.
by CNB