Happy Land - A Lover's Revenge: The nightclub fire that shocked a nation by OJ Modjeska

Author:OJ Modjeska [Modjeska, OJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reality Plus - A Next Chapter Imprint
Published: 2020-04-10T22:00:00+00:00

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As the morning wore on, the grotesque revelations about the scene inside Happy Land continued.

Firefighters and EMS personnel had seen things that shocked them to their very core. One after another, the men appeared on newscasts, ashen-faced and visibly shaken, struggling to find words for what they had witnessed.

“This is the worst thing I have ever seen in my career,” EMS specialist Christopher McCarthy said. “It hurt my stomach. It was sickening. Most of the bodies were in dance clothes. They were out to have fun… I saw wall-to-wall bodies—an indication of mass confusion and panic.”

A Red Cross worker told the press that some of those trapped had punched a hole through a wall to the adjoining union hall in their desperation to escape. The victims had clearly been in a state of pure and desperate terror, frantic to survive. But, as EMS Executive Director Thomas Doyle said, “There was no way out. They never had a chance.”

The FDNY revealed the sad finding that there had only been a single fire extinguisher in the building. It was found clutched in the hands of the club manager as he lay dead on the stairs, right where he dropped. “He never had a chance to pull the pin,” Nastro later remarked.

The New York City Medical Examiner were still faced with the task of determining an exact cause and time of death for each of the 87 victims. But what was clear at this early stage was that these people, particularly those on the upper floor, had died at an unbelievable speed not often seen in fatal fires.

The principal theory for why this had occurred, as outlined above, was oxygen deprivation and toxins in the smoke. EMS representatives, however, at this time floated an alternative theory. Some of them thought that those things alone could not account for “death in seconds, not minutes.”

They suspected that the fire in the enclosed building had perhaps gotten so hot so quickly that it had released superheated gasses, with temperatures in the order of 1600 to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. This phenomenon is the one most feared by firefighters, called a flashover. One possible consequence of a flashover if there are humans in the space is that the superheated gasses could sear their airways before the fire even got to them. This would prevent them taking another breath and kill them instantly—even as they clutched a drink or sat at a table.

Dr. Charles Hirth, the Chief Medical Examiner, disputed the flashover theory. “If that had happened, you'd expect to see blistering on the walls of the club, and that was not observed,” he said. “But there's still a lot of speculation flying about.”

Even if a flashover had not occurred, there was an indication that the temperature in the upper room had gotten extremely hot. This was shown by the fused condition of some bodies, which demonstrated that the heat was in the order of a range where fat begins to melt.

Whatever the explanation, this was a fire with consequences the likes of which few even thought possible.

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