NFPA Journal - October 2016 Home Fire Sprinkler Special Issue - 51

SPECIAL ISSUE
HOME FIRE SPRINKLERS

ROB FEENEY

COMMON SENSE
A Station nightclub fire survivor joins the home sprinkler fight

n February 20, 2003, Rob Feeney and his fiancée, Donna Mitchell, were among the scores of
people packed into The Station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island. Onstage pyrotechnics started a devastating fire that killed 100 people, including Mitchell, and injured many more,
Feeney among them. He recently wrote a series of blog posts for NFPA's Fire Sprinkler Initiative
(firesprinklerinitiative.org) that detailed his recovery, his struggles, and the purpose he found as a burn survivor,
including his work in support of home fire sprinklers. Feeney recently became a call firefighter with the Onset Fire
Department in Massachusetts and advocates for fire sprinklers and fire safety issues nationwide for Common
Voices, an advocacy initiative of the National Fire Sprinkler Association (fireadvocates.org), and the Phoenix
Society for Burn Survivors (phoenix-society.org). The following is an excerpt from Feeney's FSI posts.

Following The Station fire, I had very few plans except to see Donna's two daughters through
high school. After that, I really didn't care what happened to me. ¶ In 2006, I was introduced to
the Phoenix Socitey for Burn Survivors. It's the largest national peer support organization for
burn survivors, their families, healthcare professionals, and fire service and industry personnel.
In 2008, I attended its annual conference, the World Burn Congress, in Cleveland, Ohio. I was
extremely overwhelmed and didn't talk to many people the first couple of days. However, I listened to keynote speakers who had battled through adversity and beat the odds to live lives of
happiness. ¶ That year I also met Amy Acton, the Phoenix Society's executive director. At the following year's World Burn, she remembered me. She asked if I would be available for local media
interviews. She also invited me to attend a special training by media guru Brad Phillips to develop
my advocacy skills. Amy then asked me to join her at a live burn/sprinkler demonstration and
then on a local TV show to discuss the Phoenix Society and fire sprinklers. I was enjoying what
little [advocacy] I was doing, even though I didn't know where it was leading. ¶ In 2010, I [went]
to Tennessee to testify in front of the Chattanooga City Council to get a bylaw passed requiring
fire sprinklers in the city's nightclubs ... I was given three minutes to speak. I told them that three
minutes was all it took to kill 96 of the 100 people in [The Station] fire. The bylaw passed by one
vote. ¶ The councilman who cast the deciding vote met me in the hallway to thank me for my
testimony and let me know that I had changed his vote. Following the hearing, the mayor of Chattanooga invited us to his office and thanked me for helping him protect the people in his city. ¶
I realized what Amy Acton had in mind for me. I was using my voice and my story for a greater
cause. I was a fire sprinkler advocate. Reliving my story was not only helping me emotionally, but
was also helping enact changes in fire safety ... In 2013, I was honored to be the second recipient of
the Phoenix Society's Advocacy Award at the World Burn Congress in Providence, Rhode Island.
¶ Being an advocate changed how I lived my life. It created a confidence I had been missing. I was
able to find love again, get married, start a family, and, to the surprise of many people, enter the
fire service. ¶ I am one voice with one story trying to speak for Donna and the others who lost
their lives in The Station fire. Raising awareness and advocating for new sprinkler laws has largely
been an uphill battle. Sometimes it seems like an unnecessary battle, since we're talking about
common sense. We've made definite footprints in the sand on the fire sprinkler issue, but [they]
can be washed away over time if they're not walked over again and again. So we walk again. We
keep going until our footprints are no longer in the sand, but are in concrete-to stay for good.

OCTOBER 2016 NFPA JOURNAL

http://www.firesprinklerinitiative.org http://www.fireadvocates.org http://www.phoenix-society.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - October 2016 Home Fire Sprinkler Special Issue