Indiana State Fairgrounds Explosion

WHEN A POPCORN MACHINE KILLED 74 PEOPLE ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT

Twelve hours ago, this was just another Halloween. Children went trick-or-treating. Families carved pumpkins. By evening, thousands had made their way to the Coliseum for Shriners Night—a sold-out ice skating spectacular that had been the highlight of the season for years.

Now the performers are spinning through their closing numbers under bright spotlights. In the south-side mezzanine, Barbara Staten, nine years old, is sitting beside her parents, her grandmother, and her brother. Someone has just spilled a soft drink down her back. Her family is laughing. She does not know that in less than a minute, she will be the only one of them left alive.

Beneath her seat, in a cramped concession storage area, a faulty valve on a rusty 100-pound propane tank has been leaking for hours. The gas is heavier than air. It does not rise. It pools. It creeps across the concrete floor in a dense, invisible cloud, filling an enclosed room with no ventilation, no gas detection equipment, and no emergency shutoff.

The cloud reaches an electric popcorn warmer.

What happens next takes a fraction of a second.

A massive explosion rips through the concrete structure, shooting a 40-foot column of orange flame through the seating area. The force is so immense that a 700-square-foot section of the mezzanine which consists of solid concrete slabs, steel supports, and rows of occupied seats is launched into the air. Spectators are thrown 60 feet onto the ice floor. Bodies and rubble rain down on the performers below.

But the nightmare is only beginning.

A damaged support wall collapses. Another 500 square feet of flooring caves in, plunging spectators into a jagged blast crater. They land on top of each other, pinned under tons of debris. Then, minutes later, the remaining propane tanks ignite in a secondary explosion. A massive fireball surges from the crater to the ceiling. It burns those trapped in the pit. It burns the rescuers who rushed in to help. The people who survived the first blast are killed by the second.

When it is over, 54 people lie dead among the twisted metal and blood-stained ice. The final death toll will climb to 74. Nearly 400 others will be permanently scarred or injured. The victims will include entire families. It will remain the deadliest single disaster in Indiana history.

But here is what makes this tragedy unbearable: every single death was preventable.

The propane tanks should never have been in that room. The valves had been known to leak. The space had no ventilation. And when at least one person noticed a mist of gas filling the concession area before the explosion, the show kept going. Four thousand people kept watching while a time bomb swelled beneath their seats.

To understand how this happened, we need to go back. Not to the moment of the explosion, but to the decisions that made it inevitable.

By the end of this video, you'll understand exactly why a grand jury indicted the state fire marshal, the fire chief, and the Coliseum managers for involuntary manslaughter—and why, despite the overwhelming evidence of dereliction of duty, not a single person would ever see the inside of a prison cell.