Wasabi the J posted:

Do not watch or listen to this footage.

I legitimately have nightmares from the screams, to this day; I watched this years ago.

Baronjutter posted:

Combustible construction is dumb. I know wood is cheap and renewable and newer wooden buildings are built to better fire codes but old wood buildings are fire death traps.

Wasabi the J posted:

Do not watch or listen to this footage.

I legitimately have nightmares from the screams, to this day; I watched this years ago.

Loucks posted:

Well sure, don't click thinking it's MLP or anything.

queserasera posted:

Recently my workplace held active shooter training taught by a cop who was one of the first responders to the Virginia Tech shooting. The "training" consisted of audio clips like the Columbine 911 call and video clips like the Station club fire, the Tech shooting personal stories, and the school board shooting that happened in the Midwest I think. I had to leave the training early because I couldn't sit there any longer and ended up missing two shifts at work due to PTSD. Turns out it's not a good thing to spring unexpectedly on people, including adult survivors of childhood abuse.

It's also coming up on the ten-year anniversary of the Tech shooting.

Glazier posted:

Isn't that kind of the point though? You need to be desensitized to the point where you don't just freeze or panic when you start hearing shots fired.

Wasabi the J posted:

Do not watch or listen to this footage.

I legitimately have nightmares from the screams, to this day; I watched this years ago.

Alereon posted:

Huh, so it turns out the US has one of the worst fire death rates in the industrialized world, and it's currently over twice that of the UK, where wood construction is unknown.

Lord Zedd-Repulsa posted:

I came across this article today about a fire that burned so hot the fire hoses were essentially shooting steam at it. Six firefighters got trapped and died as a result of the maze-like conditions inside the abandoned building.

http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a1098/perfect-fire-0700/

Phanatic posted:

Bwuh? There's a whole bunch of wood construction in the UK. It's also six times that of Switzerland, where wood construction is common.

While we're on the subject of fire: What was prior to the OKC bombing the worst mass-murder in US history was carried out at an unlicensed nightclub in the Bronx called Happy Land. The place had been shut down and the building condemned two years before by the fire department because an inspection turned up the lack of fire exits, a sprinkler system, or even fire alarms. But it stayed operating illegally and no follow-up inspection was ever performed.

Then a Cuban army deserter who snuck into the US via the Mariel boatlift got pissed off because he lost his job and his girlfriend broke up with him, put $1 worth of gasoline in a plastic bottle, dumped it inside the only entrance to the club, and lit it up. When firefighters showed up it only took them 5 minutes to put the fire out, but that was more than enough time for 87 people to die.

LeJackal posted:

New rule. Always locate exits when I go someplace. Have a plan for fire.

verbal enema posted:

Who the gently caress says a fire exit is only for a band

Solice Kirsk posted:

I get that being a bouncer is literally keeping people out of certain doors, but you'd think in a fire that's when you get to actually just let anyone through. How many people could he have saved by yelling, "There's an exit this way too." I doubt he sleeps very well.

verbal enema posted:

Who the gently caress says a fire exit is only for a band

LeJackal posted:

He's probably dead, so soundly.

Celery Face posted:

Could be wrong but I remember hearing a survivor say she ran into him years later and when she confronted him, he pretty much just laughed in her face.

queserasera posted:

Recently my workplace held active shooter training taught by a cop who was one of the first responders to the Virginia Tech shooting. The "training" consisted of audio clips like the Columbine 911 call and video clips like the Station club fire, the Tech shooting personal stories, and the school board shooting that happened in the Midwest I think. I had to leave the training early because I couldn't sit there any longer and ended up missing two shifts at work due to PTSD. Turns out it's not a good thing to spring unexpectedly on people, including adult survivors of childhood abuse.

It's also coming up on the ten-year anniversary of the Tech shooting.

quote:

“Somewhere in the night he got the idea he should take her with him to the next life,” Murrie said. “The belief was unprecedented. He had no cultural or religious beliefs to support the idea.”

quote:

A Virginia Tech doctoral student lunged at a fellow student in a campus cafe and began cutting her head off with a knife while staring at her face with a blank, determined expression, a cafe worker testified Friday.
...
By the time police arrived, Zhu was holding the woman's head in his hand, an officer testified.

Aesop Poprock posted:

In regards to the Station bouncer, it's actually even worse than that if everything she writes about it actually happened:

http://imgur.com/2Cl8RxL

That's like cartoonish levels of villainy

Solice Kirsk posted:

Holy poo poo. He sounds like an evil wizard from a lovely novel, but instead of practicing the dark arts he wears a "Security" shirt and brags about keeping people in a fire at benefits for that fire's victims. It boggles my mind, but having known people almost that hosed up it's not totally unbelievable. What a sick gently caress.

Delivery McGee posted:

theflyingorc posted:

Virginia Tech, you say?

I'm pretty sure it's been in this long thread before, but the murder that occurred at an on campus restaurant a few years after the shooting is really terrifying:

http://www.collegiatetimes.com/news/zhu-sentenced-to-life-in-prison/article_1f28daca-f295-5a1d-8763-b8584d0eac89.html


That article is a really interesting portrait of the killer, but it skips over an important part of the crime.


I can't find any information on his current status. I wonder if he'll ever get out of prison.

Loucks posted:

Then watch the footage.

quote:

A few patrons escaped despite an initial period of indecision. Harold “Hal” Panciera came to The Station that night with low expectations, and the place, “an overcrowded dump,” lived up to them. Panciera was thirty-five and coming off a rough stretch. Just three weeks out of rehab for cocaine addiction, he sat “stone cold sober” at the main horseshoe bar smoking cigarettes when Great White took the stage. He can be seen in Brian Butler’s early video walkthrough of the main bar, seated next to the Sanetti party.

Panciera had a clear sight-line to the stage from his perch at the bar, and he didn’t like what he saw. The moment flames began climbing the walls behind Great White, he “knew that people were going to die — the place was just that crowded.” Panciera initially ducked behind the bar’s curve about ten feet from the exit door and waited for his buddy, who had gone to the men’s room. Before long, however, black smoke tumbled toward him across the ceiling. It fast became too thick to see anyone, but he “distinctly recalls hearing the bar cash register open.” Someone scooped the till.

As heat in the room rose in seconds from tolerable to scalding, Panciera could hear, over the screams, people banging blindly on the walls, feeling for any door or window opening. Working his own way along the east wall of the club, he groped for the bar exit door until he “popped out” of it, into breathable air. Once he became reoriented, Panciera returned to the bar door and yelled inside, but there was no response. He turned and walked twenty feet farther south to the kitchen door. It stood open and empty, flanked by snow piles. All who would exit through it on their own had long since left. Inside were only black smoke within a few feet of the floor and an eerie silence. When he yelled into the door, Panciera truly expected no response. But a man answered, “Help! I’m burning alive! I can’t get out!” Panciera knew he could not reenter through the dense smoke, so he yelled for the man to stay on the floor and tell him if he felt snow. Panciera then began throwing snowballs along the floor in a radial pattern. After several tosses, the man responded, “I feel it!” So, Panciera kept throwing snowballs in the man’s direction, instructing him to follow them. When the man crawled within feet of the kitchen door, Panciera reached inside and dragged him out.

Brian Butler’s video from outside the club more than five minutes into the conflagration clearly shows the five-foot-seven, 150-pound Panciera standing in the parking lot, staring toward arriving firetrucks and shouting, “Gimme a medic!” Over one shoulder, he carries a two-hundred-pound unconscious man. Behind him, flames belch from the club’s front doors. Beside him, a leather-vested club-goer holds a pitifully tiny fire extinguisher aloft in one hand. In the foreground, firemen drag an uncharged line past a blackened, still-smoking man who writhes on the pavement moaning, “Turn it on . . . turn it on.” And Dan Biechele scrambles to free that same fire hose from beneath a car tire. One can only surmise Biechele’s horror at what he had unwittingly set in motion. Panciera never learned the identity of the man on his shoulder — the lucky one, who had escaped the inferno on a trail of snowballs. But the victim spoke with Panciera about his children after regaining consciousness and awaiting transport to a hospital. Panciera is sure the man survived.

Celery Face posted:

Killer Show goes into detail about the man at 5:55 carrying someone else over his shoulders and calling for a medic.

Solice Kirsk posted:

That's some next level cleverness under pressure.