“Everyone was pushing and shoving… The fire started out small, but in a matter of seconds it exploded,” Taynne Vendruscolo, another survivor, told reporters. “Those who were close to the stage could not get out.”
The discotheque’s fire permit had expired in August 2011, the local press reported, citing Moises Fuchs da Silva, head of the state fire department.
Santa Maria fire chief Guido de Melo said the fire caused widespread panic, and that many revellers were trampled or died from smoke inhalation. He said club security blocked people from exiting, sparking panic and trampling.
Young men helped evacuate the wounded as firefighters doused the blackened shell of a red brick building with water and used sledge hammers to punch holes in the walls to get people out faster.
The bodies were taken to a sports stadium that was blocked off by police to keep grieving family members from streaming in.
Family members and survivors, many of them sobbing and some with soot-blackened faces, gathered outside in the hope of getting news of their loved ones. The town is home to the Federal University of Santa Maria.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff cut short a visit to Chile, where she was attending a European and Latin American summit, to head to Santa Maria and oversee the response to the tragedy.
“It’s a tragedy for all of us, and I cannot continue here at the summit, because my priority is the Brazilian people,” the visibly emotional leader told reporters travelling with her in Santiago.
She said federal and local authorities are mobilizing “all resources, so that we do not just recover the bodies but also support families at this time and provide very efficient care to the injured.”
Argentina’s transplant centre INCUCAI said it would be sending banked skin to help Brazil with a likely greater need for burn-related skin grafts.
The tragedy recalled a 2003 blaze in a nightclub in the US state of Rhode Island that killed 100 people and another in Buenos Aires in 2004 that killed some 200, both blamed on faulty safety measures.
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