Brazil Nightclub Fire Likely Killed More than 200: Police

[Hissyspit]

Last edited Sun Jan 27, 2013, 07:41 AM - Edit history (1)

Source: Reuters

Brazil nightclub fire likely killed more than 200: police

Sun Jan 27, 2013 6:30am EST

BRASILIA (Reuters) - A nightclub fire in southern Brazil has probably left more than 200 people dead, a senior police official said on Sunday.

Major Gerson da Rosa Ferreira, overseeing rescue efforts at the scene for the military police, told reporters that 159 bodies had already been identified and removed from the nightclub in the southern city of Santa Maria.

He said the victims had suffocated or been trampled, and that the death toll was likely to be above 200 people.

(Reporting by Ana Flor; Writing by Brian Winter; Editing by Mark Heinrich)


Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE90Q04T20130127

[UnrepentantLiberal]

1. Using pyrotechnics in a nightclub is still a bad idea.

[dipsydoodle]

6. By coincidence

I only found out yesterday the exact background to Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water. From their hotel they'd seen the roof of the venue of the Montreaux Festival catch fire after someone fired a flare gun during a Frank Zappa concert.

"We all came out to Montreux on the Lake Geneva shoreline / To make records with a mobile - We didn't have much time / Frank Zappa & the Mothers were at the best place around / But some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground / Smoke on the water, fire in the sky... "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreux_Casino

[titaniumsalute]

17. As a pyrotechnician I disagree

I would agree that anyone using pyrotechnics illegally or without experience is a very bad idea especially indoors. However, if done correctly with trained technicians, you can do amazing effects without anyone getting hurt.

We do 2,000 displays every year and have for decades. We've never had these problems being safety is paramount.

[davidpdx]

2. Per CNN 2,000 in the nightclub

[Cooley Hurd]

3. That's twice as many that died in The Station nightclub fire...

...and, it started the exact same way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire

[mahatmakanejeeves]

16. There's a link at that Wiki to this video:

It is just unimaginable how little time elapsed between the first flames and total conflagration. The videographer didn't waste any time getting out.

[MADem]

4. The Station Nightclub, revisited....terrible.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/08/18/idUSN18471058

Mon Aug 18, 2008 4:35pm EDT
Aug 18 (Reuters) - The state of Rhode Island and the town of West Warwick have agreed to pay $20 million to victims of a Rhode Island nightclub fire that killed more than 100 people, the latest in a string of settlements that total roughly $175 million.

Court papers filed on Monday showed that a settlement in principle has been reached, five years after one of the deadliest blazes in U.S. history raced through The Station nightclub. More than 200 people were injured....Victims of the fire charged that the town was negligent because the small, wooden nightclub was overcrowded on Feb. 20, 2003, when sparks from rock band Great White's fireworks show ignited the club's highly flammable polyurethane foam sound insulation.

Nearly a third of the crowd, which prosecutors put at 458, were trapped inside the burning building.

The victims also charged that the state's fire marshal, who is responsible for inspecting commercial structures, failed to enforce the state's occupancy rules or ensure that potential fire hazards be repaired.

[Blue_Tires]

19. I was surprised that everyone on the news compared it to the Station

While the Buenos Aires fire didn't even warrant a mention

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rep%C3%BAblica_Croma%C3%B1%C3%B3n_nightclub_fire

It's sad that nobody seems to learn the lessons of these tragedies...

[MADem]

20. I don't remember hearing about that one! I was doing a lot of travelling at that time, though,

so I wasn't watching a lot of television.

Those pyrotechnic flares are just a bad idea indoors--what ever happened to a clever light show? Too pedestrian?

Of course, you put a lot of people in a nightclub, you pair that with poor maintenance, or shoddy infrastructure, or lousy oversight, and it's an accident waiting to happen.

Way back when, when WW2 was at full bore, well before pyrotechnics, the Coconut Grove fire left hundreds of families in Beantown devastated. That fire changed fire laws everywhere as well as burn treatment protocol. It would have been much, much worse had Boston College won the big game (they had tables reserved at the club, but slunk away in shame to the more staid Statler to lick their wounds as a consequence of their defeat and so were not in attendance).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_Grove_fire

[Blue_Tires]

21. I was working at the ProJo at the time

and one of the reporters who covered the Station went down to Buenos Aires to cover that and write a comparison...IIRC, there was a lot of information sharing between our cities and especially our media since the tragedies were so similar and happened relatively close to each other chronologically...

[MADem]

23. You know what? Now that you mention it, I DO remember seeing a compare/contrast

piece, either print or media, but didn't connect it so far away from the event.

[Bosonic]

5. A theme emerges...

2009: Santika Club, Bangkok, Thailand - sparked by fireworks; 66 killed
2009: Lame Horse Club, Perm, Russia - sparked by fireworks; 150 killed
2003: The Station, Rhode Island, US - sparked by fireworks; 100 killed

[UnrepentantLiberal]

10. Pyrotechnics were also involved in a 2004 night club fire in Argentina that killed 194 people.

What part of "don't set off fireworks indoors" not common sense?

[dipsydoodle]

7. Truly awful

Mainly students according to news reports : I feel for their parents.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

8. The death toll is up to 245

Which is right at half the number of people who were in the club.
http://rt.com/news/night-fire-dead-brazil-833/

[Berlum]

9. The night of the full moon

[DesertRat]

11. Horrific

[frazzled]

12. Tragic, but this is not the only bad news from Brazil today

It is odd that just hours before this horrible tragedy, a big piece appeared in the New York Times about exploding manholes in Rio (how's that for weird), and other serious infrastructure problems. Is this wonderful country going to be ready for the World Cup and Olympics? (My friend who just spent nearly a month there thinks not).

Rio’s Exploding Manholes Menace Residents and Highlight Aging Infrastructure

RIO DE JANEIRO — David McLaughlin was thrilled to be in Brazil. He had arrived here from Ohio State University on a Fulbright grant to research Brazilian hip-hop music with his wife, Sarah Lowry, a scholar of Russian literature. The graduate students, newlyweds, set out one morning in June 2010 to search for an apartment in the beachfront neighborhood of Copacabana.

Then, while crossing a bustling avenue, the asphalt under their feet started to tremble. A fireball surged suddenly from a manhole, enveloping Ms. Lowry in flames. Mr. McLaughlin leapt on her and extinguished the fire. But Ms. Lowry had burns on 80 percent of her body and spent 70 days in the hospital here. Mr. McLaughlin was burned on 35 percent of his body. ...

Since 2010, manhole explosions here have shattered windows, flattened cars and injured passers-by. An explosion in 2012 killed a worker at Rio’s port. While the rate of explosions has slowed, the city was rattled yet again in December after a manhole erupted behind the Copacabana Palace, the neo-Classical-style gem that is arguably Rio’s most luxurious hotel. A motorcyclist narrowly escaped the recent blast, filming with his cellphone his motorcycle going up in flames. ...

While passenger traffic at Rio’s international airport climbed 20 percent last year, it has been plagued by blackouts in recent weeks, escalators and elevators work sporadically, and vultures have descended through holes in the airport’s roof.

Rio’s car fleet grew 56 percent in the last decade, but road building and public transportation improvements failed to keep pace, intensifying traffic jams. Last year in downtown Rio, a 20-story office building just collapsed one night, knocking down two other buildings and killing 17 people.

Amid such challenges, erupting manholes have endured as just one more bizarre and potentially dangerous feature of the cityscape.

Some Cariocas have found dark humor in the sheer randomness. A video game for Facebook, “Rio Boom-eiro Challenge,” involves the nimble avoidance of sidewalk explosions.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/world/americas/rio-de-janeiro-grapples-with-exploding-manholes.html?ref=world

[ocpagu]

18. A heavily biased article.

I became used to expect that from Simon Romero.

Of course Rio and Brazil have serious infrastructure problems. But the article was written just putting together all the flaws, problems and worries (several of them unrelated), just to create a sensation of a "permanent catastrophic" site. Sensationalism is the approach New York Times is taking when it comes to Latin America.

Just two examples in the same paragraph: "Rio’s car fleet grew 56 percent in the last decade, but road building and public transportation improvements failed to keep pace, intensifying traffic jams. Last year in downtown Rio, a 20-story office building just collapsed one night, knocking down two other buildings and killing 17 people."

The first sentence can be applied to every big city on this planet. And, as a matter of fact, the traffic jam in Rio is nowhere near the chaotic levels of New York, Chicago, L.A. or Sao Paulo. The second sentence refers to an isolated incident and it was not caused by infrastructure flaws, rather than a badly-conducted reform by the building owners. But Romero probably felt that it would feel better to increase the drama with a "everything-is-falling-apart" remark.

The manholes are connected to underground galleries that are very old (early 20th century). The city hall is making a lots of investments to fix the galleries and the number of occurrences is down.

The tragic fire in the disco is not related to any infrastructure problems. Very similar fires had happened in Russia, Argentina, Sweden, United States, Ireland, Australia, etc.

The western press is also heavily biased when it comes to their outook on the capacity of non-developed nations of achieving results. If the nation hosting a world cup or the olympics is not the US, Canada, Australia, Japan or Europe they will keep years telling us how everything will be a disaster... and then, everything just happens in a quite normal manner - like in South Africa. But they insist in the practice.

Brazil is the 6th largest economy of the world. If it can't host an event like the World Cup or the Olympics... well... very few nations can. Besides, Brazil has already hosted the World Cup in 1950 (when it was a much, much, much poorer nation) without any problems, it has hosted twice the Pan-American games (São Paulo in the 60s and Rio last decade) again without any problems.

I don't see why it wouldn't be prepared.

[MADem]

22. That was happening in Georgetown and other neighborhoods in DC a few years ago...

It went on for five or six years. Maybe more.

Not sure if it is still happening--I saw one explode about a half block from me; freaked me out!

[Marksman_91]

13. Truly tragic, but there is a lesson to be learned here.

There has to be stricter enforcement of rules regarding what can and can't be done inside these buildings. It seems all these incidents have happened due to irresponsible use of pyrotechnics. There should be a zero-tolerance policy regarding the transportation of highly flammable materials such as fireworks into closed public spaces. Also, from other sources that I've read, the club seemed to be in overcapacity, which would obviously make it much more difficult for the people inside to exit the structure.

[Heywood J]

14. This has happened so many times that it's obviously something beyond stupidity

causing this to keep happening. With so many past events to demonstrate the inevitable consequences, these deaths should be treated as homicides.

[Judi Lynn]

15. Argentina to send skin grafts for Brazilian fire victims

Argentina to send skin grafts for Brazilian fire victims
28 January 2013
Press Trust of India

BUENOS AIRES, 28 JAN: Argentina will send skin grafts to Brazil to treat people suffering serious burns in the wake of a disco fire in Santa Maria city, the health ministry announced today.

“We will make as many skin grafts available as possible to our Brazilian peers, as fast as we can,” said health ministry spokesman Gabriel Yedlin.

This in response to a request made by Rosana Reis Nothen, transplant coordinator in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, to Director of the National Implant Institute of Argentina (INCUCAI), Carlos Soratti.

At daybreak today, a fire ravaged the Kiss nightclub, in Santa Maria, 286 km from Porto Alegre, killing more than 200 people and wounding scores of people, currently being treated in hospitals in the area.

http://www.thestatesman.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=441015&catid=37

(Short article, no more at link.)