BY JIM BARON

PROVIDENCE — Just six weeks after he was sworn in as governor, while on a brief Florida vacation with his wife and grandchildren to relax from a year and a half of campaigning and setting up a new administration, Donald Carcieri got a call in the middle of the night from his then-chief of staff, Ken McKay.

There was a terrible fire in a nightclub in West Warwick. It looked like a lot of people may have been hurt.
The Station nightclub fire on Feb. 20, 2003, was, of course, much more horrific than that. Hour by hour, the bad news kept getting worse. It was so awful that the full extent of the devastation wouldn’t be known until days, weeks and even months later, as the grim body count continued to climb and climb until, ultimately, there were 100 people dead and almost twice as many injured and burned to varying extents.
McKay, who had made his first call from the road on the way to the scene, now called back to confirm the worst, at least as the worst was understood at that point.
With no opportunity to sleep, Carcieri packed some clothes into a suitcase and made arrangements with Florida State Troopers to get him to the nearest airport, where he caught the first flight out at 5:30 a.m. that day. The first images Carcieri saw of the deadly blaze were in the televisions at the Charlotte, N.C., airport, where he made a connecting flight to T.F. Green.
He was driven from there out to the site, where he watched firefighters discovering bodies one by one and pulling them from the smoking wreckage. Work stopped each time so ministers could say a prayer for the deceased.
Many Rhode Islanders got their first glimpse of their new governor in action in the days that followed — visiting the still-smoldering recovery scene, sitting with the families of victims at a nearby hotel as they waited to hear whether their loved ones were dead or alive, organizing a makeshift 24-hour morgue operation so the dead could be identified and returned to their families — all covered nearly non-stop by not only the local media, but by regional and national outlets as well.
First lady Sue Carcieri stepped forward during this period as well, holding hands and lending a comforting shoulder to people who were living their worst nightmare — their son, their daughter, their spouse, their mother, their father, their best friend had gone out one evening and were never coming back.
Donald Carcieri is a businessman and politician. His wife Sue is a teacher and a homemaker. Neither are ministers, nor are they counselors. How did they know what to say to these people sitting in a hotel ballroom with their lives shattered at their feet like a smashed window that was never going to be fully put back together?
“Both of us come from close families, large families, it’s just human,” the governor answered. “We’ve all in some way in our lives been touched by tragedy and lost loved ones. I think we can all relate to the heartbreak of it.
Still, he acknowledges, “There’s nothing you can say that is going to make any difference. What people actually appreciate is that you are just there. You hold their hand, you give them a hug; it’s not that you can do anything, it’s just being there.”
During a recent memorial event, Sue Carcieri recalled, family members read out the names and ages of those who died. Many of the victims were in their 30s “Our children, at that point, were all in their 30s. It’s just a very personal thing and you can relate.” She had also spent two and a half years in nursing training, which helped her prepare for the hospital visits to see the burned and injured. “It’s hard to be prepared for that, but I was, somewhat. I didn’t feel uncomfortable there and I knew, a little bit, what they were going through.”
Carcieri didn’t remember until later that he had been warned to prepare for disaster.
Shortly after each election, rookie chief executives attend a new governors’ orientation to get them ready for their new jobs. Carcieri’s inclination was to skip it, but predecessor J. Joseph Garrahy and others told him it would be worthwhile. At one of the first sections, the governors-elect were told that one of the first things they should do is appoint a head of emergency management. That baffled the Republican from Rhode Island.                                                           
“You make a long list of things you want to do,” Carcieri said in a recent interview in his Statehouse office. “That wasn’t even on my list.”
But they said, they guaranteed, that within the first six months of a new administration something was going to happen in their state — a flood, a hurricane, a wildfire — that demands an emergency response. And, he says they warned, “most of your term, you will be judged on how you managed that event.
“Well it wasn’t six months, it was six weeks when that terrible fire tragedy occurred,” the governor recalls. “That kind of resonates every time I think of it. We talk about it a lot. Six weeks into the job, that fire occurred. Who would have thought that would have happened?”
“That determined 90 percent of what you did for the next six weeks to two months,” Mrs. Carcieri remembers. “The fire was over, but the consequences went on. I was really struck by that: several weeks determining the identity of some of the victims – he was in charge of all of that. It really struck me how a big part of his job was managing that particular disaster and how it didn’t end quickly, by any means. It was a good couple of months before anything got back to normal.
“Meanwhile, we were visiting every day with the families,” she said, “He would stay in that room for an hour or more speaking with the families. It just crushed me. It was crushing to speak to the families, many of whom knew they had lost loved ones, or didn’t know (for sure) which was worse, if that is possible.
“It was so unbearable,” the first lady said. “The feeling in that room was so oppressively sad.”