Topeka ? On Feb. 20, 2003, the State Fire Marshal’s office received a complaint about a Montgomery County bar that one inspector deemed a “disaster waiting to happen.”

The same day, 96 people died when a blaze roared through a packed West Warwick, R.I., nightclub. A similar tragedy could have happened anywhere in Kansas, State Fire Marshal Joe Odle said Tuesday.

“Probably Rhode Island went for a lot of years before something that horrific happened,” he said. “But somehow everything came together, and it did.”

Odle told the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee there were nightclubs across Kansas that didn’t meet building and fire codes, but his department could not do anything unless someone complained.

“A lot of clubs in the rural part of Kansas, we don’t even know they’re there,” he said.

Odle, who was appointed by Gov. Kathleen Sebelius a week after the Rhode Island blaze, said his office didn’t have enough resources in its $3.5 million budget to inspect all the bars in the state.

The problem is, he said, many counties don’t have the resources, either.

“A lot of counties don’t have building inspectors, and they have volunteer fire departments where nobody knows anything about building codes,” Odle said after the committee meeting. “It’s not anybody’s fault.”

Tom Groneman, director of the state Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control, said his agents could keep an eye out for violations and report them to Odle’s office. But with only 18 ABC employees in the field, the problem still won’t be resolved, Groneman said.

“We need to sit down with our compliance people and enforcement people and see where we go,” he said. “We offer a different set of eyes, and if something doesn’t look right, we can report it. Any time we can cooperate, we will.”

In Montgomery County, one bar, which officials did not identify, could hold 1,000 people, but the exits would allow only 400 to leave quickly, said Karl McNorton, chief deputy state fire marshal, who investigated the complaint.

Odle said his office also received a complaint from Cloud County that a bar had a capacity of 550 people but sometimes had more than 1,400 jammed inside.