An intense fire ripped through a nightclub crowded with university students in southern Brazil early on Sunday morning, leaving behind a scene of horror with bodies piled in the club’s bathrooms and outside on the street.
At least 232 people were killed, many of them students in the agronomy and veterinary medicine programs in a local university, the police officials said.
As my colleague, Simon Romero reports, a flare from a live band’s pyrotechnic show ignited the fire in the nightclub, called Kiss, in the southern city of Santa Maria. Throughout the morning on Sunday, rescue workers hauled bodies from the still smoldering building.
Amateur videos posted to YouTube showed scenes of chaos as medics scurried over the bodies of apparently unconscious victims checking for signs of life.
Officials and witnesses now say that security guards at the club had locked some exits, sewing panic as people attempted to flee the flames and smoke.
“Only after a multitude pushed down the security guards did they see the crap they had done,” said Murilo de Toledo Tiecher, 26, a medical student who survived the fire, in comments posted on Facebook.
Shortly before the fire, a club D.J. posted a photo on Facebook from inside the crowded club with the caption: “Kiss is pumping.”
A short time later, another photo purportedly taken inside the club and widely disseminated through social media showed smoke billowing on the crowded dance floor.
BOATE KISS PEGANDO FOGO! http://t.co/tdV2DO4q
— Boatos SM ® #LUTO (@BoatoSM) 27 Jan 13
The fire quickly engulfed the building.
Firefighters, apparently joined by volunteers who shielded their faces with T-shirts, struggled to pull people from the burning building.
Photos from the scene showed frantic friends and family members gathered outside the club and the hospital.
As Mr. Romero reports, witnesses said the fire started around 2 a.m. after a rock band, Gurizada Fangangueira, took the stage. At least one member of the five-person band, which is based in Santa Maria and advertised its use of pyrotechnics in its own publicity materials, was reportedly killed in the fire.
Overcrowding and a disregard for fire safety codes have led to deadly blazes at nightclubs in the past, though Sunday’s tragedy in Brazil is among the worst in recent history.
In 2003 in Rhode Island, a fire set off by a pyrotechnic display at a club killed about 100 people. A fire that erupted under similar circumstances in Russia left almost as many dead dead in 2009.
And in Luoyang, China in 2000, 309 people were killed in a fire that broke out at a dance hall, forcing some to leap from high-rise windows.
The Lede Blog: Fire at a Nightclub in Southern Brazil
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