Every December 3rd, around 6:13pm, I stop for a minute and remember the Worcester 6.
On December 3rd, 1999, two homeless people named Thomas Levesque and Julie Ann Barnes were living inside the Worcester Cold Storage Warehouse. The building was abandoned. It was a relic of another age, six stories tall, so close to the elevated Interstate 290 that, if you wanted to, you could reach from the side of the highway and almost touch the façade of the building.
The building was a nightmare, should it catch on fire. A maze inside; no windows above the second floor; walls 18 inches thick, stuffed all the way with insulation, to keep the sides of beef once stored inside cold. The building hadn’t been used in a long time. It was one of many abandoned buildings in Worcester’s tragic downtown.
The candle or candles being burned by Levesque and Barnes tipped over, and they left, without letting anyone know there was a fire.
At 6:13pm, the first alarm sounded, and at 6:14, the first responders arrived, with reports that homeless people were possibly squatting inside.
I had been hired at WTAG the week before, as a fill-in reporter and anchor. I’d turned 26 two months before. I’d done traffic for WBZ in Boston, and transferred to Providence to build up my anchoring skills. Worcester, Massachusetts seemed like a good news city. They needed somebody here and there. I could pick up a few bucks, covering City Hall, even though I’d never really reported before.
The call from Worcester came early in the morning, as I was finishing my morning drive airshift in Providence. “We need you.”
For the next week, I only slept in my a few hours a night while driving the 45 minutes between Providence and Worcester every day, working my two full-time jobs. I didn’t know I was an epileptic yet; I thought the strange sensations I was having were symptoms of exhaustion and maybe the smoke, the constant smoke and thick heavy air that surrounded the Cold Storage Building.
Let me tell you everything you need to know about the Worcester Fire Department. That night, when they heard there might have been people in that inferno, they went in. And when the first team didn’t respond, a second team went in. And when the second team fell silent – there are alarms on their oxygen tanks that cry out when there is no movement — a third one went.
Now imagine this. Imagine the line of men, wearing the equipment they have to wear to walk into that situation and do their jobs, lined up—so many of them they filled a city block. And imagine being the Deputy Chief who had to turn to them and make the decision that Worcester 6 were probably lost, that he would not lose another man to that monster building. Imagine having to live with that decision.
The fire went to five alarms. When a fire goes to three alarms in Massachusetts, reporters pay attention. Five is enormous. And it burned for six days before it was brought under control. It took eight days to find all the bodies. We didn’t report it at the time, but firefighters had to crawl through the debris to find their brothers, as the building had collapsed.
I will never forget their names.
- Paul Brotherton was 41.
- Jeremiah Lucey was 38.
- Thomas Spencer was 42.
- Timothy Jackson was 51.
- James Lyons was 34.
- Joseph McGuirk was 38.
The starkest moment of that week, for me, was Michelle Lucey approaching the microphone bank after her husband’s body was found, holding the hands of her two small boys, the December cold helping to form all these magnificent ice sculptures with the water the fire hoses left behind, the corpse of the Cold Storage building rising like a ghost behind her, the oddly quiet canopy of the closed I-290 over her, her voice cool and calm. She only wanted to say ‘thank you’. She thanked the city. She thanked the fire department. She thanked all the people who had shown up with food and water and gifts and nothing but goodwill. She thanked everyone who was calling and offering anything she and the other families needed. She thanked the reporters for telling the story of her husband’s last night.
I remember how beautiful the December sky was behind her.
Worcester was where I learned to stand back in a tragedy. I’m not going to rush a widow, and I’m not going to do it because of Michelle Lucey. She has no idea who I am. I never spoke to her. I never stuck a mic in her face. My mic was at the mic bank, and she talked when she was ready. I’m not going to go after a firefighter who’s just lost a friend and comrade. I’ll go up to the union head, like I did in Worcester, with my tape off, and offer my condolences first. I mean them, too. I got to ask if I get something on tape, but I make it clear it’s the shittiest part of my job.
I try to learn from these tragedies. The WFD invited me to their training facility on their media day, about 18 months after the Cold Storage Fire, after I proved myself not to be an asshole. Worcester’s facility is one of the best in New England. They dressed me up the uniform – picture Ralphie’s kid brother in A Christmas Story trying to walk in his snowsuit – strapped on the oxygen tanks – and carried me down the stairs into the basement of their fireproof house because I couldn’t move my legs (believe me, there are worse ways to spend a work day then being carried around by members of the Worcester Fire Department) and proceeded to set bales of hay soaked with gasoline on fire to show me how a fire burned. They showed the difference between looking through smoke with the bare eye and looking through smoke with special cameras that cut through the smoke to show the outline of a body, cameras the city refused to spend money on before the fire because they cost eight thousand dollars, cameras that might have saved a life or six. (Worcester native Denis Leary’s cousin Jerimiah Lucey was one of the Worcester 6; Leary founded the Leary Firefighters Foundation to raise money for equipment. The LFF does a lot for the families of the firefighters lost in the Twin Towers, too. Denis Leary is not an asshole, no matter what he tells you.)
Worcester was the first time I lost it on the air. It wasn’t the week of the fire. It was the anniversary, when I spent eight hours at the scene in below freezing weather, reporting on all the tributes people left the dead. It wasn’t the firefighter themed teddy bears, or the notes to the lost, or the WFD t-shirts people left. It was the six cans of Budweiser somebody left.
Those guys were never going to come out of that building and have a cold one. My voice caught, live on the air, while describing those red and white cans, laid out before the collapsed crypt the Cold Storage building had become. “I’m sorry,” I said. “One second,” and I got back on track and finished up.
My news director, when I got back to the station, said, “Well, you are human, aren’t you?”
The secret shame of news is we build our careers on these things. I got hired full-time after the Cold Storage Fire. I covered City Hall for four years, in the second-largest city in New England. It was a great gig. And the company pulled me out of there and sent me to Providence. Where tragedy waited again.
At 11:07 at night on February 20, 2003, while the band Great White – popular for 15 minutes in the early 90s – was preforming inside The Station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island – pyrotechnics were set off. Within seconds, the soundproofing foam that lined the walls and ceiling along the stage caught fire. The entire club was engulfed within 5 ½ minutes.
My cluster of stations was sponsoring the concert. We had a reporter still at WHJJ, who heard the rumor of a fire and went to go check it out. He roused our newly hired news director, who called me early on Friday morning and told me to go directly to the hospital, where I found a nightmare.
Parents, husbands, wives, wandering around the grounds where Rhode Island’s several hospitals stood in Providence, all searching for news amid chaos, all begging anyone who looked official for news. That included me, unshowered, because I had a microphone. “Do you know anything?” No, I said. I didn’t.
We knew the horror within a few hours. 100 people had died. They died because the old nightclub, constructed completely of wood, was grandfathered in under old laws, and exempt from new construction laws, and didn’t have to have sprinklers. Its doors opened in, not out, which meant in the panic, people pressed up against the doors and couldn’t get out. 230 more were hurt, some burned horribly. 130 more escaped uninjured. Some broke windows in the bathrooms and crawled out through the glass. One jock at our rock station died. The son of one of our talk show hosts died.
When the bodies were counted, The Station was the fourth-deadliest nightclub fire in American history.
100 people. And yet, hope sprung in that parking lot, mutual to three hospitals in Providence. “Put my son’s/daughter’s/wife’s/husband’s name on the air,” people asked me, over and over. “They must have amnesia in there. They can’t remember their name.”
Here’s where news hits up against compassion.
I have a duty, as a journalist, to tell the story. As a human being, I have a duty not to take advantage of pure, raw, pain. I put those people on the air. I did not put their names on. That, in my opinion, would have been cruel. I only ask very neutral questions when the news is that bad. Never something as stupid as “how are you feeling?” Both in Worcester in West Warwick, I put down my recording equipment and wished people my best, or offered my condolences. It doesn’t make me a great reporter. Some situations go beyond that.
I never told those families in Rhode Island that Boston and Worcester were sending refrigerated trucks to use as rolling morgues, because Rhode Island did not have the capacity. I never told them the Governor was about to meet with them and privately and ask them to bring their loved one’s hairbrushes and toothbrushes so DNA could be used to ID the badly burned and the dead. It was not my job to crush their denial.
Again, shameful advancing among tragedy. After The Station, I was offered my first job in New York. I was not the only one.
In Newtown, Connecticut, had I been sent to cover (I am an anchor and writer at the Great Big News Station, not a reporter) — I would have interviewed the kids, but only with a parent standing by. But I have to cover it. The children, in this case – they are the witnesses. I might not have used their names. TV could have gone the extra step and not used their images, only their voices.
The late, great, Mike Wallace often said it is the reporter’s job to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I try to do that. I try to minimize harm.
Ryan Lanza just lost his brother and mother and has to live the rest of his life with the fact that his brother killed 26 people. We need to remember that before we splash his face everywhere. He didn’t do anything wrong. And it’s wrong to speculate that he did just to fill up airtime.
I drive my husband nuts at home, because I can’t leave the house or go to bed until I do what I call my “firewalk” – checking the house to make sure every candle is out (I’ve covered two legendary fires and still love candles, analyze that) and ensure no appliance has frayed wires. I don’t like dive bars with poorly marked fire exits. I check to make sure the doors open out.
I like to sit by the door.
While I was teaching last semester, one of my non-traditional students who had spent his life as an EMT and is now studying psychology came up to me after the class where I talked about covering the Cold Storage and The Station Nightclub Fires. I choked up a bit, and apologized to my students, saying it was the first time I’d ever talked about it in front of anyone.
“You know you’re suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, right, Proff?”
“Show me a reporter who isn’t, Chris,” I replied.
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