LAUREL, MD -- Twenty years ago, Robert Feeney and his fiancé headed out to a nightclub with friends to see a band.
It was a cold, snowy night and he thought about staying home. But changed his mind – a decision that changed his life forever.
Feeney said he and the others were excited to see Great White perform. But, upon entering the Station Nightclub, he encountered an ‘uncomfortable crowd.’
As he described the next moments, which to him felt a lot longer, the audience at the 64th annual Mid-Atlantic Life Safety Conference was silent.
He found a spot toward the stage.
Within minutes, he told his fiancé the wall was on fire. As it grew, it was not part of the show as she told him.
As the flames spread to a ceiling, he said someone threw a fire extinguisher on the stage and ran.
There was an exit near the stage and they found it.
“But, a guy stopped us and said it was for the band only. He told us to go out the front door.”
“People were running and falling. The fire was rolling over our heads…”
When he and his fiancé fell, they became separated. He landed on a level two or three steps down from her. The only thing he could see at first was her sneaker.
As the ceiling started collapsing him, “my hands were melting, my head was melting…’
He crawled, feeling a wall, looking for a way out. He found a hole where a piece of plywood had been and fell into a vestibule. Once outside, he fell into a snowbank.
Firefighters asked him if he could make it across the street to a triage area. “I told them I could.”
But he didn’t.
“I woke up 12 days later – the day of my fiance’s funeral.”
His road to recovery was slow and involved multiple surgeries.
“Fire prevention wasn’t something I was thinking about that night. I mean who thinks about when you’re going to a nightclub. I figured it was safe, that someone would have inspected it to make sure…”
Feeney would soon learn otherwise. Shortcuts were taken and the walls around the stage were greasy from the material used to enhance the sound.
“I knew nothing about sprinklers,” he said, adding that he was in the lawn care business at the time.
“I wanted to be a police officer,” he said. “I was a reserve or seasonal officer.”
A short time after the incident, he got the call that he once hoped for.
“The police chief called and asked if I was still interested…I told him I couldn’t…that I had been in a fire…”
As he was recovering from his physical injuries, he was contacted by the Phoenix Society. It was a godsend.
He started learning all he could about sprinklers, codes and fire prevention.
He met with officers and firefighters who responded to the incident, and together, they started to heal.
As one who hated public speaking, he wasn’t so sure he could address the Chattanooga city council about sprinklers in nightclubs but went for it.
He overheard one of the officials say: ‘Chattanooga doesn’t have a fire problem. That’s a Rhode Island problem…’
After hearing his story, however, the council approved the measure.
Joining the fire service was something he’d never considered. But, one day, one of the firefighters told me: ‘Hey, we’re hiring. Are you interested?’”
“It was all good,” he said of the first time entering a burning building as an Onset, MA Fire Department firefighter. “No flashbacks…”
He’s now a captain and continues as an operational firefighter and still promote fire prevention.
When he goes into building anywhere, he looks up to see if there are sprinklers.
“If I don’t see them, you’ll find me standing near an exit.”
