Brazil in mourning after deadly nightclub fire
Brazil awoke in mourning on Monday as the country prepared to bury the first of more than 233 young people killed in the third worst nightclub fire on record.
SANTA MARIA, Brazil (AP) — The bodies of the young college students
were found piled up just inside the entrance of the Kiss nightclub,
among more than 230 people who died in a cloud of toxic smoke after a
blaze enveloped the crowded locale within seconds and set off a panic.
Hours
later, the horrific chaos had transformed into a scene of tragic order,
with row upon row of polished caskets of the dead lined up in the
community gymnasium in the university city of Santa Maria. Many of the
victims were under 20 years old, including some minors.
The first funerals of victims were planned for Monday.
As
the city in southern Brazil prepared to bury the 233 people killed in
the conflagration caused by a band's pyrotechnic display, an early
investigation into the tragedy revealed that security guards briefly
prevented partygoers from leaving through the sole exit. And the bodies
later heaped inside that doorway slowed firefighters trying to get in.
"It
was terrible inside — it was like one of those films of the Holocaust,
bodies piled atop one another," said police inspector Sandro Meinerz.
"We had to use trucks to remove them. It took about six hours to take
the bodies away."
Survivors and another 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.
"It was
chaotic and it doesn't seem to have been done in bad faith because
several security guards also died," he told The Associated Press.
Later,
firefighters responding to the blaze initially had trouble entering the
club because "there was a barrier of bodies blocking the entrance,"
Guido Pedroso Melo, commander of the city's fire department, told the O
Globo newspaper.
Police inspectors said they think the source of
the blaze was a band's small pyrotechnics show. The fire broke out
sometime before 3 a.m. Sunday and the fast-moving fire and toxic smoke
created by burning foam sound insulation material on the ceiling
engulfed the club within seconds.
Authorities said band members
who were on the stage when the fire broke out later talked with police
and confirmed they used pyrotechnics during their show.
Meinerz,
who coordinated the investigation at the nightclub, said one band member
died after escaping because he returned inside the burning building to
save his accordion. The other band members escaped alive because they
were the first to notice the fire.
The fire spread so fast inside
the packed club that firefighters and ambulances could do little to stop
it, survivor Luana Santos Silva told the Globo TV network.
"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," she said.
Most
victims died from smoke inhalation rather than burns. Many of the dead,
about equally split between young men and women, were also found in the
club's two bathrooms, where they fled apparently because the blinding
smoke caused them to believe the doors were exits.
There were
questions about the club's operating license. Police said it was in the
process of being renewed, but it was not clear if it was illegal for the
business to be open. A single entrance area about the size of five door
spaces was used both as an entrance and an exit.
Family members
of those killed walked around the gym in a daze Sunday evening,
shuffling between caskets or holding one another and weeping as they
identified loved ones and tried to make sense of what had happened.
Elaine
Marques Goncalves lost her son Deivis in the fire. Another son who
attended the college party at the nightclub, Gustavo, was barely alive
after suffering two cardiac arrests caused by smoke inhalation.
She learned of the blaze after the mother of her sons' friends called her early Sunday.
Brazil's soldiers carry a container with the remains of a victim outside
a gymnasium where bodies were brought for identification in Santa Maria
city, Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil, Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013. Flames
raced through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil early Sunday,
killing more than 230 people as panicked partygoers gasped for breath in
the smoke-filled air, stampeding toward a single exit partially blocked
by those already dead. (AP Photo/Nabor Goulart)
"My
boys were not home and I had no news. I turned on the TV — the tragedy
was all over the television," she said at the makeshift morgue. "All I
knew was they had gone to a club, I didn't know which one. I kept
saying: 'Where do I start? Where do I go?'"
Television images from
the city of about 260,000 people showed black smoke billowing out of
the nightclub as shirtless young men who attended a university party
there joined firefighters using axes and sledgehammers to pound at the
hot-pink exterior walls, trying to reach those trapped inside.
Bodies
of the dead and injured were strewn in the street and panicked screams
filled the air as medics tried to help. There was little to be done;
officials said most of those who died were suffocated by smoke within
minutes.
Within hours the community gym was a horror scene, with
body after body lined up on the floor, partially covered with black
plastic as family members identified kin.
Outside the gym police
held up personal objects — a black purse, a blue high-heeled shoe — as
people seeking information on loved ones crowded around, hoping not to
recognize anything being shown them.
The gathering was a party
organized by students from several academic departments from the Federal
University of Santa Maria. Such organized university parties are common
throughout Brazil.
Survivor Michele Pereira told the Folha de S.
Paulo newspaper that she was near the stage when members of the band lit
some sort of flare.
"The band that was onstage began to use
flares and, suddenly, they stopped the show and pointed them upward,"
she said. "At that point, the ceiling caught fire. It was really weak,
but in a matter of seconds it spread."
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," he said. "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.
Federal
Health Minister Alexandre Padhilha told 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.
Most
of the dead apparently were asphyxiated, according to 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.
"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 told
the AP.
Sunday's fire appeared to be the worst at a nightclub
since December 2000, when a welding accident reportedly set off a fire
at a club in Luoyang, China, killing 309.
Similar circumstances
led to a 2003 nightclub fire that killed 100 people in the United
States. Pyrotechnics used as a stage prop by the 1980s rock band Great
White set ablaze cheap soundproofing foam on the walls and ceiling of a
Rhode Island music venue.
No comments:
Post a Comment