RIO DE JANEIRO — A fire ignited by a flare from a live band’s pyrotechnic spectacle swept through a nightclub filled with hundreds of university students early Sunday morning in Santa Maria, a city in southern Brazil, leaving at least 232 people dead, police officials said.
Throughout Sunday morning, health workers hauled bodies from the nightclub, called Kiss, to hospitals in Santa Maria, with some survivors were taken to the nearby city of Porto Alegre to be treated for burns. Valdeci Oliveira, a local legislator, said he saw piles of bodies in the nightclub’s bathrooms after entering the venue with rescue workers.
Col. Guido Pedroso de Melo, the commander of the city’s fire department, said security guards had locked the doors needed to exit the club, intensifying a panicked stampede to flee the blaze. Public security officials in Santa Maria said Sunday that emergency responders had counted at least 232 dead, down from a previous estimate of 245.
Witnesses who survived the fire described a scene of mayhem inside the nightclub as patrons rushed for its main exit.
“I only got out because I am strong,” Ezequiel Corte Real, a 23-year-old survivor, told reporters. He said he helped others escape the blaze, as well.
The disaster in Rio Grande do Sul, a relatively prosperous state in southern Brazil, sent shock waves throughout the country. President Dilma Rousseff canceled appointments at a summit meeting in Chile to travel to Santa Maria, city of about 260,000 residents that is known for its cluster of universities.
Brazil is not alone in facing such a tragedy. The disaster ranks among the deadliest nightclub fires in recent memory, comparable to the 2003 blaze in Rhode Island that killed 100 people, a nightclub fire in 2004 in Buenos Aires in which 194 were killed and a fire at a club in China in 2000 that left 309 dead.
Still, the circumstances surrounding the blaze, from the use of pyrotechnics in a crowded nightclub to reports of locked exits, are also expected to raise questions as to whether the owners of the venue were negligent in the episode. While it is not clear why patrons were initially not allowed to escape, it is common across Brazil for nightclubs and bars to have customers to pay their entire tab upon leaving, instead of on a per-drink basis.
“It is a scene of horror,” Elizabeth Shimomura, a police investigator who arrived at the nightclub Sunday, said in televised comment.
Indignation among some of the survivors on Sunday already pointed to a heated discussion over who was responsible for the tragedy.
“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.
Witnesses said the fire started around 2 a.m. after a rock band, Gurizada Fangangueira, began performing for an audience numbering in the hundreds, mostly students in the agronomy and veterinary medicine programs in a local university.
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. Many of the other victims died of smoke inhalation, according to emergency officials.
“The smoke spread very quickly,” said Aline Santos Silva, 29, a survivor of the blaze, in comments to the GloboNews television network. “Those who were closest to the stage, where the band was playing, had the most difficulty getting out.”
More broadly, the blaze may also focus attention on issues of accountability in Brazil, pointing to the disconnect between an economy on more solid footing and the relaxed enforcement of measures aimed at protecting citizens. Preventable disasters still commonly claim lives in Brazil, as illustrated by Rio de Janeiro’s building collapses, manhole explosions and trolley mishaps.
“Bureaucracy and corruption also cause tragedies,” said Andre Barcinski, a columnist for Folha de São Paulo, one of Brazil’s largest newspapers.
Human rights officials focused Sunday on the grief in Santa Maria. “How many families are now searching for their young one?” asked Maria do Rosário Nunes, a cabinet minister who is Ms. Rousseff’s top human rights official.
Brazilian television stations broadcast images of trucks carrying corpses to hospitals in Santa Maria, where family members were gathering on Sunday. Photographs taken shortly after the blaze and posted on the Web sites of local news organizations showed frantic scenes in which people on the street outside the nightclub pulled bodies from the charred venue.
The tragedy took place in a part of Brazil in which Ms. Rousseff made her political career before rising to national prominence as a top aide to the former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and running for president herself. Before departing from the summit in Chile on Sunday, she appeared distraught, crying in front of reporters as she absorbed details of the blaze.
“This is a tragedy,” she said, “for all of us.”
Fire Sweeps Through Nightclub in Brazil; Scores Dead
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Fire Sweeps Through Nightclub in Brazil; Scores Dead
