233 die in Brazil club blaze

Pile of bodies blocked exit, rescuers say

Relatives of victims react as they wait for news in front of the Kiss nightclub in Santa Maria, Brazil, on Sunday.
Relatives of victims react as they wait for news in front of the Kiss nightclub in Santa Maria, Brazil, on Sunday.

— Flames raced through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil early Sunday, killing 233 people as panicked party goers gasped for breath in the smoke-filled air, stampeding toward a single exit partially blocked by those already dead. It appeared to be the world’s deadliest nightclub fire in more than a decade.

Inspectors believe the blaze began when a band’s small pyrotechnics show ignited foam sound-insulating material on the ceiling, releasing a putrid haze that caused scores of university students to choke to death. Most victims died from smoke inhalation rather than burns.

Survivors and police Inspector Marcelo Arigony said security guards briefly tried to block people from exiting the club. Brazilian bars routinely make patrons pay their entire tab at the end of the night before they are allowed to leave.

But Arigony said the guards didn’t appear to block fleeing patrons for long. “It was chaotic and it doesn’t seem to have been done in bad faith because several security guards also died.”

photo

AP

People help a man injured during a fire at the Kiss nightclub in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil, early Sunday. Officials suspect the blaze began when a band’s pyrotechnics show ignited sound-insulating material.

Television images from Santa Maria, a university city of about 260,000 people, showed smoke pouring out of the Kiss nightclub as shirtless young men who had attended a university party joined firefighters using axes and sledgehammers to pound at windows and walls to free those trapped inside.

Guido Pedroso Melo, commander of the city’s Fire Department, told the O Globo newspaper that firefighters had a hard time getting inside the club because “there was a barrier of bodies blocking the entrance.”

Teenagers sprinted from the scene desperately seeking help. Others carried injured and burned friends away in their arms.



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“There was so much smoke and fire. It was complete panic, and it took a long time for people to get out. There were so many dead,” survivor Luana Santos Silva told the Globo TV network.

The fire spread so fast inside the packed club that firefighters and ambulances could do little to stop it, Silva said.

Guitarist Rodrigo Martins told Radio Gaucha that the band, Gurizada Fandangueira, started playing at 2:15 a.m. “and we had played around five songs when I looked up and noticed the roof was burning.”

“It might have happened because of the Sputnik, the machine we use to create a luminous effect with sparks. It’s harmless, we never had any trouble with it.

“When the fire started, a guard passed us a fire extinguisher, the singer tried to use it but it wasn’t working.”

He confirmed that accordion player Danilo Jacques, 28, died, while the five other members made it out safely.

Police Maj. Cleberson Braida Bastianello said by telephone that the toll had risen to 233 with the death of a hospitalized victim - he said earlier that the death toll was likely made worse because the nightclub appeared to have just one exit through which patrons could exit.

Officials earlier counted 232 bodies that had been taken for identification to a gymnasium in Santa Maria, which is at the southern tip of Brazil, near the borders with Argentina and Uruguay.

Victims in critical condition were being airlifted to the nearby city of Porto Alegre for treatment, while families are also receiving psychological support. Federal Health Minister Alexandre Padhilha said at a news conference that most of the 117 people treated in hospitals had been poisoned by gases they breathed during the fire. Only a few suffered serious burns, he said.

The fire prompted President Dilma Rousseff to cut short her participation in a meeting of Latin American and European leaders in Santiago, Chile, so she could return to Brazil. The president,who lived for more than a decade in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where Santa Maria is located, arrived in the city Sunday to visit the scene of the fire and console families of victims, according to the presidential website.

“It is a tragedy for us all,” Rousseff, choking back tears, said to reporters in Santiago earlier Sunday before returning to Brazil. “Who needs me today is the Brazilian people, and that’s where I have to be.”

Rousseff declared three days of mourning for the victims of the fire, Agencia Brasil reported, without saying where it got the information.

Most of the those killed in the fire apparently were asphyxiated, said Dr. Paulo Afonso Beltrame, a professor at the medical school of the Federal University of Santa Maria who went to the city’s Caridade Hospital to help victims.

Beltrame said he was told the club had been filled far beyond its capacity during a party for students of the university’s agronomy department.

Survivors, police officers and firefighters gave the same account of a band member setting the ceiling’s soundproofing ablaze, he said.

“Large amounts of toxic smoke quickly filled the room, and I would say that at least 90 percent of the victims died of asphyxiation,” Beltrame said.

“The toxic smoke made people lose their sense of direction so they were unable to find their way to the exit. At least 50 bodies were found inside a bathroom. Apparently they confused the bathroom door with the exit door.”

In the hospital, the doctor “saw desperate friends and relatives walking and running down the corridors looking for information,” he said, calling it “one of the saddest scenes I have ever witnessed.”

Rodrigo Moura, identified by the newspaper Diario de Santa Maria as a security guard at the club, said it was at its maximum capacity of between 1,000 and 2,000, and party goers were pushing and shoving to escape.

Santa Maria Mayor Cezar Schirmer declared a 30-day mourning period, and Tarso Genro, the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, said officials were investigating the cause of the disaster.

The blaze was the deadliest in Brazil since at least 1961, when a fire that swept through a circus killed 503 people in Niteroi, in Rio de Janeiro state.

The band performing at the nightclub, Gurizada Fandangueira, plays a mixture of Brazilian country music styles and advertised its use of pyrotechnics in its own publicity materials. Martins told Radio Gaucha the musicians were receiving hostile messages Sunday.

“People on the social networks are saying we have to pay for what happened,” he said. “I’m afraid there could be retaliation.” Information for this article was contributed by Juliana Barbassa, Marco Sibaja, Stan Lehman and Bradley Brooks of The Associated Press; by Stephan Nielsen and Matthew Malinowski of Bloomberg News; and by Simon Romero and Jill Langlois of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/28/2013

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