A nightclub fire killed at least 233 people in southern Brazil early on Sunday when a band's pyrotechnics show set the building ablaze and fleeing partygoers stampeded toward blocked and overcrowded exits in the ensuing panic, officials said.
Witnesses said there was a stampede of people trying to reach one exit of the Kiss nightclub in Santa Maria, a university city in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. Many of those who survived had been in the VIP section closest to the door.
Most of those who died were suffocated by fumes, fire brigade Sergeant Robson Muller told Reuters. Others were crushed in the stampede. "Smoke filled the place instantly, the heat became unbearable," survivor Murilo Tiescher, a medical student, told GloboNews TV. "People could not find the only exit. They went to the toilet thinking it was the exit and many died there."
Matheus Bortolotto, a dentist who survived the fire, said some of the victims had been trapped by crowd control barriers. "The club's barriers used to organise queues locked people in," he told Correio do Povo. "One girl died in my arms, I felt her heart stop beating. It was like a movie scene. The ambulances could not cope with the number of casualties. We could not manage to use the emergency exits. Those at the bottom of the club had no chance." He said the flare had been set off by the band, Gurizada Fandangueira, during the first song but the crowd only reacted when they saw black smoke coming from the stage.
Michele Pereira, another survivor: "The band that was onstage began to use flares and, suddenly, they stopped the show and pointed them upward. At that point the ceiling caught fire. It was really weak but in a matter of seconds it spread."
Murilo de Toledo Tiecher, a medical student, claimed security guards did not realise the gravity of the fire and initially tried to stop people leaving. "People were screaming 'there's a fire' but the security guards didn't budge and tried to keep the door shut," he told Zero Hora newspaper. "Five or six people knocked over one security guard and knocked down the door. It was the only exit. The first people to get out tried to pull out whoever was still inside. Hands and arms appeared from the curtain of smoke. I pulled out a girl by the hair. It was chaos."
Luana Santos Silva, 23, told GloboNews that she was near the exit when the fire started. "We looked at the ceiling at the front of the stage and saw a fire was starting," she said. "My sister grabbed me and dragged me across the floor. It was a small emergency door for so many people." Her sister Aline, 29, added: "The smoke spread very fast, it did not give people time to escape. People started to get sick and soon people were leaving covered in soot."
Some of the bodies of the victims were taken to a nearby municipal sports centre where families gathered to identify the dead. Authorities are reportedly struggling to identify some of the female victims, who became separated from their handbags in the club. Brazilian press on Sunday night reported that most of the victims were aged between 16 and 20, despite the event being for over 18s, as many teenagers are thought to have attended with fake ID cards.
The governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Tarso Genro described the fire as a "brutal tragedy". A 30-day period of mourning was announced by the state.
The fire in Santa Maria was thought to be the worst of its kind since Christmas Day, 2000, when a welding accident reportedly set off a fire at a club in Luoyang, China, killing 309. In December 2004, a fire killed 194 people at an overcrowded nightclub in Buenos Aires, Argentina, after a flare ignited ceiling foam.
Sources: Reuters and Telegraph
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