By Tom Symonds, BBC | Warning: This article contains themes you may find upsetting | Gina Russo was watching a gig with her husband-to-be, Fred Crisostomi, when she realised something wasn’t right. Great White, an 80s hair-rock band, had opened their set with a thrash of guitar chords, as four large pyrotechnic flares shot out from the stage. The flares instantly set fire to the surrounding acoustic foam panels, installed to deaden the sound.
“It was immediate,” Gina tells BBC News. “It got bad very fast. The backflash just happened that quick.”
Then came “a black rain of smoke”, Gina adds, the heat melting, then shattering, glass lights above people’s heads. Gina and her fiance made for the nearest exit, a door to the right of the club’s small stage. A bouncer blocked their way, but Gina has no idea why.
That’s when “a stampede” began for the main exit, she says, and Fred desperately pushed her ahead in the crowd. Gina says “bodies were piling up” as people scrambled to get out – and her last memory was making it through the door to safety before passing out.
When she woke from an induced coma 11 weeks later, Gina learned her fiance had saved her life but had lost his in the fire.
This was 2003, at The Station nightclub in the snowy town of West Warwick, Rhode Island, on the east coast of the United States.
Some 22 years on, there was a near-identical event at Le Constellation bar in the equally snowy ski resort of Crans-Montana, Switzerland, in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2026. At The Station nightclub, 100 people died and at Le Constellation, 40, mainly young people, lost their lives. Many survivors of both fires have severe burn injuries.
The two disasters have striking similarities, and not only in their appalling impact on victims. Both were caused by indoor pyrotechnics, experts say. Victims appear to have had little time to find an escape route, and foam panels may have spread the Swiss fire in an identical way to The Station nightclub fire.
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