When you go to watch a performance at a small club, it should be a great experience. One of the best encounters of seeing a band is to see them when they are playing in a small venue, just before they are about to make it big. It’s something that is recommended to any music aficionado. It should be enjoyable. This week’s story, however, is when nobody at one of those small clubs enjoyed themselves. The repercussions of this incident almost brought down the Romanian government. This week The Beat Marches On to 30th October 2015, when a fire broke out at the Club Colectiv.
It wasn’t the biggest club in Romania. It wasn’t the biggest club in Bucharest. Legally, it was only supposed to hold 80 seated guests however, around 300 people were in attendance to see Goodbye to Gravity at their homecoming show. Many thought the band were about to make the break to the mainstream. They became a known name but for the wrong reasons.
It was towards the end of GTG’s set when the fire broke out. They wanted to finish with a bang by adding some pyrotechnics to the show. They did it at the start of the gig and went off without a hitch. The second time they weren’t so lucky.
It wasn’t a huge firework that set off. It was a little one that produced a few sparks. One of those sparks hit a pillar wrapped in polyurethane foam used for soundproofing and extremely flammable. The pillar went up in seconds and within a minute all hell broke loose in the Club Colectiv.
When the fire started spreading up the pillar, the singer of the band, Andrei Galut, alerted the crowd that it wasn’t part of the show. He asked for a fire extinguisher, but the fire was spreading too quickly.
Within a minute the polyurethane on the ceiling started to burn and went up within seconds the foam was turning into toxic liquid and started to drop onto the crowd below trying to escape. 72 seconds into the fire toxic fumes of black and yellow gas from the burning foam engulfs the club. Two and a half minutes into the fire it extinguished itself. The repercussions, however, would haunt the attendees for the rest of their lives.
The fire in all killed 64 people including four of the five members of Gateway to Gravity. Only Galut survived. 200 people were injured mostly with burns. In the days after the fire, more information about the club came out. Public mourning turned into anger.
The Club Colectiv owners didn’t have a fire safety permit. It didn’t have any sprinklers, emergency exits, and one-way in and out of the club. There was a double door as an exit, but only one of the doors was open and the second needed a lot of force to open due to lack of maintenance.
The lack of fire safety features, which were mandatory for buildings in Romania, raises questions about what was going on at the government level. How was this small club allowed to have more than three times the number of patrons inside? Why was it allowed to host anything without a fire permit? And what’s going on in government to allow this to happen? The answer is summed up in one word. Corruption. It won’t be the first time that corruption will come up in this article, but the club owner paid off government officials to not have the right permits. Remember this was less than a decade ago, it wasn’t in the 1950s when the public didn’t know any better.
With their mourning now turning into anger, the public went to the streets and protested that this disaster could have been prevented if they had done their job and not just thought about lining their pockets. They were especially angry against the mayor of Bucharest as he represented the borough or sections as they call it in the city, where the club was based.
The protests in the city were the biggest seen in the country since the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989. In three days, 30,000 people took to the streets. The scandal was so big that the mayor Christian Popescu Piedone had to resign in disgrace, along with the rest of his administration.
Piedone plus other government officials faced criminal charges over the fire and corruption and were found guilty. It didn’t stop the now-former mayor running and WINNING! In another sector of Bucharest in 2020 while awaiting sentencing. It wasn’t until May 2022 that he was sentenced to four years in prison for abuse of power. He had to relinquish his seat in office but still hasn’t spent a day in the big house due to appealing the sentence. Along with prison time a five-year ban from running in elections was handed out upon his release.
The blaze brought down the government, but the victims were not so fortunate. They haven’t been given any compensation from the government to help pay for their medical bills. Many couldn’t afford the charges and had to rely on handouts from charities or friends and families. In 2020 the president, Klaus Iohannis, signed into law compensation for the victims, however, there’s no evidence that the victims have received anything.
Usually, this is where the story ends. Tell what happens and the repercussions and hopefully but not always have a happy ending. Not this time though because the burn victims, who have already had enough trauma at the night club, were about to go through another hellish ride in the hospitals.
On the night of the fire, only 27 of 64 total deaths occurred. The rest were in hospital, some were due to smoke inhalation and the toxic fumes from the sound-proofing foam. Sometimes this will happen in fires like this, but in some of the cases, victims with minor burns were dying. The public was confused about why people were passing on when they only had minor injuries.
It turns out that the health department was as corrupt as the mayoral office as an investigation by sports journalist Catalin Tolontan of Gazeta Sporturilor found some shocking truths about the state of Romanian hospitals.
Even though Tolontan wrote for a sports newspaper he knew he had to put this scandal into the public domain. The number of people who were dying in hospital was disturbing and he wanted to know why.
The issue the hospital was having was in its disinfectant. An independent investigation by Tolontan and his team found that the disinfectant used was watered down by up to 80% in some samples. The company that distributed the materials, Hexi Pharma, didn’t just provide it for one hospital in Romania, but nearly all of the hospitals in the country. Doctors trying to save lives had no idea. An army medic said he had only seen the infections in a warzone.
The disinfectant wasn’t the only issue for the victims there was a brand new, state-of-the-art, burns clinic which was completed in 2010 but never opened. The government has announced they plan to produce three more specialised burns units but won’t open until next year at the earliest. Ten years after the fire.
Again, the citizens in their outrage and anger took to the streets to protest the corruption of the government. As more stories came out through the Gazeta we learned that the health minister knew about the scandal for ten years. He resigned in disgrace. The owner of Hexi Pharma, Dan Condrea, died under mysterious circumstances in a car crash that was ruled as a suicide, but others have their doubts whether others were involved. This was all before any charges were brought against him.
All in all, the mayor of Bucharest, the still ruling government’s health minister and the prime minister all resigned. The corrupt head of Hexi Pharma died, a promising band lost most of their members and decided not to carry on and most importantly 67 patrons died with 200 injured, 146 of which were hospitalized. You could blame the use of pyrotechnics in a small venue, which is another argument in itself, but, all of this happened due to a club owner who wanted to save a few Euros by not putting safety first. You may want to blame the Romanian government for this, and they don’t get away scot-free in this disaster but the true villain is the greed of the club owner who put profit over safety.
The Beat Marches On is a music blog written by Jimmy Whitehead. Jimmy has been blogging for eight years specialising in Sports (especially American Football). If you want to follow Jimmy on Twitter: @Jimmy_W1987
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The websites used for research were:
The Colectiv tragedy in Romania: The deadly club fire only burned for 2.5 minutes | Romania Insider
Colectiv fire: Romania’s deadly nightclub blaze is still an open wound five years on | Euronews
There is a documentary on YouTube about the fire called The Colectiv Disaster by Discovery Romania which was also used for research.
BBC Sounds has a podcast episode of the series Outlook: The Nightclub Fire That Rocked Romania which was used in research.
An Oscar-nominated film on the whole experience called Collective is available to rent on Amazon.
If you want to request a story for The Beat Marches On blog, you can contact jwhiteheadjournalism@gmail.com. We cannot guarantee that the story will be published but will be considered.