A striking feature of the horrifying footage from Le Constellation in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, where 40 people, mostly young adults, have died in a blaze, is how unconcerned people appear to be as fire spreads across the ceiling. Someone hits the flames with his jacket while other people film them with their phones, or just continue to dance.
It’s almost as if modern life is safe enough that people can’t believe that they are in real, immediate danger. I’m not saying that judgementally. I have no idea if I would have been any more clear-headed, and young people — especially young people drinking alcohol — can’t be expected to have the best sense of risk. Most importantly, though, the victims should not have been in that position to begin with. Bluntly, if the likely explanation turns out to have been the correct one, someone — some people — should have known that a packed basement bar with flammable soundproofing on the ceiling was an awful place for lighting sparklers. Mix this all into a carefree party atmosphere, with alcohol flowing, and it’s difficult to think of more hair-raisingly hazardous circumstances.
It remains to be seen if this is definitely what took place in Crans-Montana. But what makes it so nauseatingly plausible is that we have seen this so many times before. In 2003 there was a massive fire in the nightclub The Station in Rhode Island, USA, which killed 100 people after the band Jack Russell’s Great White set fire to soundproofing foam with pyrotechnics in the overcrowded club. The appalling scenes were captured by a cameraman who, ironically, was filming a piece on nightclub safety. There, too, don’t seem to have realised the danger they were in. The cameraman heads for the exit while most people are still watching the band. Moments later, he is filming people as they desperately block an entrance in their effort to escape.
When a flare set fire to foam in the ceiling of the Cromañón nightclub in Argentina, in 2004, almost 200 people died. Several of the emergency exits had been padlocked to prevent people from getting in without paying. A similar accident claimed almost 250 lives in the Kiss nightclub fire in Brazil in 2013. Again, pyrotechnics set fire to acoustic foam. Most of the victims died from inhaling toxic smoke rather than in the flames.
The same kind of disaster would strike Romania two years afterwards, at the Collectiv nightclub in Bucharest. The metal band Goodbye to Gravity had been celebrating the release of their latest album when sparklers set fire to the soundproofing. “Something’s on fire here,” the lead singer warned, “That’s not part of the show.” But it was too late. The 64 deaths included all but one of the members of the band.
A grotesque series of safety failures led to three of the club’s owners being convicted. Broader failures of regulation and healthcare brought down the government after tens of thousands of Romanians protested. (This was all explored in the moving Oscar-nominated Romanian documentary Collective.)
Just last year, in Macedonia, another tragedy occurred at the Pulse nightclub in Kočani. (Pulse was also the name of a nightclub in Orlando, Florida that was the scene of a mass shooting in 2016. It might be time to retire that name.) 63 people died when indoor fireworks ignited flammable soundproofing. The victims included both the members of the hip hop duo DNK, who had been performing to more than 600 people in a venue that should have held less than half that. Dozens of people, including former ministers, have been detained as part of the police investigation into how the unlicensed club was allowed to operate.
Those of us who are broadly on the right often take the position that businesses are overregulated. Often, they are. This can be true when it comes to health and safety. For example, “Martyn’s Law”, which commits even smallish establishments to expensive and time-consuming risk assessment and training, seems like a clear example of governments doing something so as to claim that they have done something. Realistically, nightlife, for example, cannot be entirely safe while also being (a) fun and (b) profitable.
Yet excesses of “health and safety” do not mean it is unimportant for people to be, well, healthy and safe. Safety and our social lives have to be balanced. Business owners who have gambled with the lives of their customers in such egregious and dangerous ways for the sake of minimising their expenditure have enabled tragedies — and they are also enabling excesses of safetyism that might follow in their wake.
I hope the catastrophe in Crans-Montana will be thoroughly investigated. The injured and the loved ones of the dead deserve to know if the venue failed them — and, if it did, if regulators failed to hold the owners to account when disaster could have been avoided.
For the rest of us, there are two simple, easy lessons, which should have been learned in 2003 and should definitely have been learned by now — avoid using flammable soundproofing, and avoid using pyrotechnics in confined spaces. People would miss celebrating New Year’s Eve. But they don’t really need the indoor fireworks.
