This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/world/americas/brazil-fire-nightclub.html

The article has changed 5 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 1 Version 2
Before Dawn, Funerals Begin for Victims of Brazil Nightclub Fire Accounts Reveal Brief but Frantic Struggle for Victims of Fire in Brazil
(about 7 hours later)
SANTA MARIA, Brazil — The first funerals began before dawn on Monday in this grief-stricken southern city for the more than 230 people killed after a fire ignited by a band’s pyrotechnics spectacle swept through a nightclub filled with hundreds of university students early Sunday. SANTA MARIA, Brazil — The band was revving up, and Luciene Louzeiro was right where she wanted to be at 2:30 a.m. Sunday, in front of the stage. As hundreds of people around her in the crowded nightclub began to dance, she saw something shoot from the stage toward the ceiling: a flare.
One of the club’s owners and two band members were arrested for questioning, according to an investigator, Ranolfo Vieira Jr., saying that they could be held for several days. “No one cared because they always do that, to make us dance a little harder,” said Ms. Louzeiro, 32, a saleswoman at a clothing store who went to the nightclub, Kiss, to celebrate a friend’s birthday. But when she looked up, she saw that the ceiling was on fire.
Family members of those killed in the blaze cautiously welcomed the news. “I started screaming, and thought, ‘When it’s your time to go, it is God who decides,’ ” she said.
“I’m burying my wife today,” said Leandro Buss, 35, whose wife, Marilene Castro, 33, died at the club. Mr. Buss was among the dozens of families grieving among coffins lined up in a municipal gymnasium in Santa Maria. The tragedy that unfolded next — a stampede away from a raging fire, a panicked struggle to open exit doors blocked by security guards and the deaths of more than 230 people, many of them university students, from asphyxiation and burns — has stunned a nation where the current attitude has typically been one of confidence and satisfaction after nearly a decade of robust economic activity.
“We’ll see who was responsible for this,” said Mr. Buss, a computer technician, staring at the ground. “I don’t know,” he continued. “Maybe we’ll see some justice since so many people were killed.” The description of the mayhem from survivors and statements by band members themselves, two of whom were taken into police custody on Monday in connection with the fire, revealed a frantic struggle for survival that lasted no more than a few minutes.
Officials revised the toll downward overnight, according to news agency reports, to 231 from 233 — most killed by smoke inhalation — while 82 were hospitalized, at least 30 in serious condition. Eliel de Lima, 31, the drummer in the band, Gurizada Fandangueira, told reporters that after he felt sparks fall from the ceiling, a percussionist nearby tried throwing water toward the ceiling. When that did not work, a security guard aimed an extinguisher at the blaze. The extinguisher failed to function, too, he said.
The disaster in Santa Maria, a city of about 260,000 residents that is known for its cluster of universities, ranked as one of the deadliest nightclub fires. President Dilma Rousseff left a summit meeting in Chile to meet with survivors, and the government declared three days of mourning. After that, panic set in on the stage and in the crowd. “Black smoke spread quickly, then I couldn’t see a thing,” Mr. de Lima said. Still, he ran toward the exit, an effort made “500 times more difficult” by the throng of people going in the same direction. At least one member of the band, which had advertised its pyrotechnics prowess as a selling point, died in the blaze.
The circumstances surrounding the blaze, including reports that guards briefly blocked the exit, immediately raised questions about whether the club’s owners had been negligent and whether enforcement of safety measures was lacking. The tumult produced desperate cries for assistance that are still echoing on social media. “Fire at KISS help,” wrote Michele Cardoso, a 20-year-old student, in a post on Facebook that has resonated across the nation. Her friends frantically replied to the post, which appeared to be delayed from when the fire was said to have been ignited. She died in the blaze, along with her boyfriend, João Paulo Pozzobon.
Witnesses said the fire started about 2 a.m. after the band, Gurizada Fandangueira, began performing at the club, Kiss, for an audience made up mostly of students in the agronomy and veterinary medicine programs at a local university. Murilo de Toledo Tiecher, 26, a medical student at the University of Caxias do Sul who was at the club, said the band’s singer lighted a kind of flare and held it over his ahead, accidentally setting the ceiling on fire. Those who survived did so after a group of patrons overpowered security guards, who initially kept people from fleeing out of concern that they were trying to leave without paying their tabs. By the time it became obvious that was not the case, the clubgoers inside had begun to die, largely from asphyxiation.
The band’s guitarist, Rodrigo Martins, told Brazilian radio that the band had played about five songs when he saw that the ceiling was on fire, according to The Associated Press. “A guard passed us a fire extinguisher,” he was quoted as saying. “The singer tried to use it, but it wasn’t working.” Among the first emergency responders at the scene around 3 a.m., Capt. Edi Garcia of Santa Maria’s police force said in an interview that it immediately became clear to him that many patrons had sought to escape through the nightclub’s bathrooms, seeking another route out of the building aside from the main doors.
He confirmed that the band’s accordion player, Danilo Jacques, 28, died, but he said five other members made it out safely. Witnesses said others near the stage, however, did not. The bathrooms, he said, resembled a scene out of a horror movie: dozens of bodies piled atop one another. “People went to the bathrooms looking for windows, they fell unconscious, then others crawled on top of them to get to the windows, and that’s how it went on happening,” Captain Garcia said.
“The smoke spread very quickly,” Aline Santos Silva, 29, a survivor, said in comments to the television network Globo News. “Those who were closest to the stage where the band was playing had the most difficulty getting out.” According to a Brazilian news report, another rescue worker found a victim’s cellphone in the charred nightclub, noticing that it had 104 missed calls on it from someone called “Mãe” — Mother.
With panic spreading, people stampeded to the exit, only to find it blocked by security guards, according to witnesses and fire officials. While it was not clear why patrons were initially not allowed to escape, it is common across Brazil for nightclubs and bars to have customers pay their entire tab upon leaving, instead of on a per-drink basis. Stung by such details and the death toll, the authorities moved quickly here to investigate the blaze. One of the club’s owners was held for questioning along with the two band members, according to an investigator, Ranolfo Vieira Jr., who said they could be held for several days. Another owner of the club later turned himself in for questioning on Monday.
Survivors described a frenzied and violent rush for the main exit. Mr. Tiecher said he and his friends had to push through a crush of people to get around a metal barrier that was preventing the crowd from spilling out into the street. He said some people became trapped after they rushed into the bathroom near the exit, thinking it was a way out. Once he was outside, he said, he tried to pull others to safety. “I died in Santa Maria today,” the writer Fabrício Carpinejar of Rio Grande do Sul, a state of rolling pampas, or plains, in which this university city is situated, said in a poem published on the front page of the newspaper O Globo. “I died on Rua dos Andradas,” he said — the street of the club.
“If we saw a hand or a head, we’d start pulling the person out by the hair,” he said in a telephone interview. “People were burned; some didn’t even have clothes.” Santa Maria, with a population of about 260,000, seemed like a city in shock on Monday. Many stores were shuttered and academic activities were suspended at the universities that are the city’s economic lifeblood. Students could be found on the street, quietly sobbing, or in the gymnasium where families and friends came to grieve among coffins lined up under basketball nets.
He said the guards initially thought that a fight had broken out inside, and that customers would use the opportunity to leave without paying their bar tabs. Only after they realized that a fire was raging inside did the security guards let the crowd go, Mr. Tiecher said. “I’m burying my wife today,” said Leandro Buss, 35, whose wife, Marilene Castro, 33, died at the club. He and their 16-year-old son were among the families at Santa Maria’s gymnasium. He appeared shellshocked, explaining that he had avoided going to the nightclub over the weekend because he was away competing in a triathlon.
Fire officials said they had trouble getting into the club because of the pileup of bodies at the entrance, according to news reports. Valdeci Oliveira, a local legislator, told reporters that he saw piles of bodies in the nightclub’s bathrooms. Health workers hauled bodies from the club to hospitals in Santa Maria all through Sunday morning. Some of the survivors were taken to the nearby city of Porto Alegre to be treated for burns. “We’ll see who was responsible for this,” said Mr. Buss, a computer technician, staring at the ground. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we’ll see some justice since so many people were killed.”
The disaster recalls the 2003 blaze in Rhode Island that killed 100 people, one in 2004 in Buenos Aires in which 194 were killed, and a fire at a club in China in 2000 in which 309 people died. At one of Santa Maria’s cemeteries, families gathered in different corners on Monday to bury their loved ones. Wailing mothers could be heard throughout the grounds. At one ceremony for Silvio Beuren, an agronomy student killed in the fire, the proud culture of the gauchos, the horsemen of the pampas of southern Brazil, was on display.
Preventable disasters commonly claim lives in Brazil, as illustrated by Rio de Janeiro’s building collapses, manhole explosions and trolley mishaps. However, the nation’s civil service has grown significantly over the past decade, tax revenues are soaring and there is no shortage of laws and regulations governing the minutiae of companies large and small. Eloi Irigaray, 40, a gaucho astride his horse at Mr. Beuren’s burial, read a poem of his own, which spoke about loss, resilience and indignation, perhaps, at those who oversee Brazil:
“Bureaucracy and corruption also cause tragedies,” said André Barcinski, a columnist for Folha de São Paulo, one of Brazil’s largest newspapers. “Here in Santa Maria / my bulwark persists / And I’ve been demanding respect from those who command the nation.”
Brazilian television stations broadcast images of trucks carrying corpses to hospitals where family members were gathering. 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 debris.
Parents and other family members wandered through Santa Maria on Sunday searching for their loved ones. “I still think she hasn’t died,” Cibela Focco, 35, whose daughter was in the nightclub and still had not been heard from, told reporters Sunday evening.
The tragedy took place in a region of Brazil where Ms. Rousseff spent much of her early political career before rising to national prominence as a top aide to former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and running for president herself. Before leaving the meeting in Chile, 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.”

Lis Horta Moriconi contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro, and Jill Langlois from São Paulo, Brazil.

Lis Horta Moriconi contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro, and Jill Langlois from São Paulo, Brazil.