GREAT WHITE - 5 Years After Rhode Island Nightclub Fire, Survivors Struggle
The following report is courtesy of the
Nytimes.com:
Savagely burned in the fire that incinerated the Station nightclub here five years ago next Wednesday, Linda Fisher has endured a dozen surgeries to salvage her arms, her hands, her face.
Ms. Fisher inhaled so much smoke that anguishing night that even now, she gets winded carrying a basket of laundry. Her thick scars keep her from sweating normally, and she has trouble distinguishing hot from cold.
Ms. Fisher feels lucky.
“There are survivors who have no ears, eyes, nose, hair,” she said.
But, like so many others who escaped the inferno, she also simmers with darker emotions.
The survivors are still waiting for their lawsuit against the Station owners and dozens of other defendants, the largest civil tort case in Rhode Island history, to play out in federal court. Many remain furious that one of the club’s owners was sentenced to community service and the other is expected to leave prison next year.
They also feel forgotten. At first, all kinds of help poured in for the roughly 200 injured survivors and families of 100 others who died in the disaster, one of the worst nightclub fires in the nation’s history. But that help has all but disappeared, even though many of the injured face more surgeries, cannot resume full-time work, and struggle to afford heating oil and other basics.
“People that were making $30,000, $40,000 a year had to take jobs making eight bucks an hour because they are so physically challenged,” said Todd King, a survivor who lives and works in North Carolina now and runs the Station Family Fund, a grass-roots nonprofit group that still raises money for the worst-off victims. “They can barely use their hands, and they’re exhausted all the time because their bodies have been put through war.”
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