Buenos Aires -- Argentina
Fire in nightclub kills at least 175
More than 600 injured
Dec 31 2004 -- A flare
lit by a concert-goer ignited the foam ceiling of a Buenos Aires nightclub, sparking an
inferno that killed 175 people and injured 619, officials said Friday. Investigators were
looking into survivor accounts that one of the building's emergency exits was locked.
Grieving parents crowded the city's morgues to
identify the dead - many of them teenagers - after the blaze swept through the club in the
Argentine capital late Thursday, setting off a stampede, witnesses said.
The fire unleashed thick clouds of black smoke,
choking many inside and blocking out emergency lighting, survivors said. After the blaze
was brought under control Friday morning, rescue workers turned a nearby parking lot into
a temporary morgue, lining up dozens of bodies whose faces were covered by T-shirts.
"You couldn't see anything, the air was thick
with smoke," said one survivor.
"People were pushing and jumping over each
other trying to get out," said another concert-goer. "It was like a human wave.
As people fell down running for the door, others just simply ran over them or pushed them
down."
Buenos Aires Mayor Anibal Ibarra on Friday confirmed
the cause of the blaze, calling the lighting of a flare in a closed environment "an
irresponsible act."
He also said that an emergency exit in the building
was believed to have been locked to prevent people from entering without paying, leaving
the main entrance as the only way in or out of the nightclub.
Flares are often lit by fans attending rock concerts
in Argentina, which are frequently rowdy and punctuated by fireworks set off by people in
the crowd.
At least 175 died and 619 were injured, said Julia
Salinas, an official with Buenos Aires emergency services department.
"Someone from the crowd tossed a flare and
there were immediately flames," said a man, 22, who was at the club to see a popular
Argentine rock band, Los Callejeros.
"Parts of the roof started falling down in
flames and people started running, knocking over the speakers and light stands," he
added. "People were choking on smoke and I tried to push as many people out as I
could."
In 2003, a nightclub fire in West Warwick, R.I.,
killed 100 people. U.S. authorities said the blaze began when sparks from a band's
pyrotechnics ignited highly flammable foam that was used in the club as soundproofing.
Overnight, relatives gathered outside Buenos Aires
hospitals, seeking information about missing loved ones. Hospital officials shouted out
the names of the injured as large crowds swarmed hospital entrances.
Many of the dead were believed to have suffered from
smoke inhalation, said Mariano Tili, a Buenos Aires city official helping in the rescue
effort.
Hundreds of bystanders and relatives stood outside
the nightclub in downtown Buenos Aires as rescue workers carried the wounded away on
stretchers. Others could be seen treating the injured on the street in front of the
Republica de la Cromagnon disco - or Cromagnon Republic disco - which is popular with
teenagers.
Ambulances packed with six or seven people ferried
the injured to hospitals and officers converted police vans into makeshift ambulances as
the number of injured and dead rose.
Streets outside the nightclub were lined with stray
pairs of tennis shoes and strewn with blackened clothes - remains of the chaotic flight
from the building by hordes of people.
Minutes after the fire broke out, shirtless
concert-goers charged out of the building, many carrying people on their shoulders. After
firefighters arrived and began to battle the blaze, many youths lingered outside the
building, calling out the names of their missing friends.
The Argentine news Media reported as many 1,500
people were believed to have been in the building at the time of the fire, with some
saying the crowd may have been almost twice as large.
"This is a true disaster . . . particularly
with so many young people and kids inside," said Interior Minister Anibal Fernandez.
The fire was the worst in South America since a
blaze swept a Paraguayan supermarket in August, killing 434 people in an Asuncion suburb.
Authorities later said the doors were ordered shut by the store's owners to prevent
looting, trapping people inside.
Buenos Aires club fire kills 175
Officials blame locked emergency exits
for high toll
Emergency exits at a nightclub packed with teenagers
were padlocked or wired shut when a flare ignited the foam ceiling, sparking a blaze that
killed 175 people and injured more than 700, survivors and officials said Friday.
Some 4,000 fans at a Thursday night concert by the
band Los Callejeros fought to reach the exits as burning debris fell on them.
But they found at least four escape routes locked in
an apparent effort to prevent people from entering the club without paying, Buenos Aires
Mayor Anibal Ibarra said.
"Had they been open, we surely would have
avoided a lot of deaths," Ibarra said, calling the locked doors at the Republica de
la Cromagnon disco an "irresponsible act."
Police want to question the club's owner, who
vanished during the inferno.
The concert crowd was nearly three times the venue's
capacity of 1,500 people, Argentine media reported.
Investigators believe the fire was caused by a flare
lit during the concert by a fan. People attending rock concerts in Argentina frequently
set off flares and fireworks, and survivors said band members appealed to fans at one
point during the show to refrain from lighting fireworks.
At least 714 people were injured, officials said. At
least 102 were in critical condition, said Julio Salinas, an official with the Buenos
Aires emergency services department.
The fire tore through the concert hall in the
working-class neighborhood of Once, filling the club with thick, black smoke.
"Someone from the crowd tossed a flare and
there were immediately flames," said a 22-year-old.
"Parts of the roof started falling down in
flames and people started running, knocking over the speakers and light stands. People
were choking on smoke and I tried to push as many people out as I could."
Witnesses described chaotic scenes of people rushing
for the doors, their vision blurred by thick smoke that blocked out emergency lighting.
A 22-year-old said surging crowds pushed their way
toward the club's six exits but found some of them would not open.
"Once the fire erupted, everyone ran for the
doors, but there was only one very narrow one open at the exit closest to us. Another
wider door next to it was locked," he said.
Other witnesses told of people struggling to force
open doors.
Someone from the crowd tossed a flare and there were
immediately flames. -- 'Republica de la Cromagnon' patron.
Shirtless people spilled out of the building,
carrying sooty victims on their shoulders and in teams. They laid people on the street and
fanned them with shirts in an effort to revive them.
Many of the victims died from smoke inhalation,
officials said.
"It seems they were condemned to a terrible
trap," Interior Minister Anibal Fernandez said.
Streets outside the downtown nightclub were lined
with stray pairs of tennis shoes and strewn with blackened clothes.
Hospital officials said many victims were in their
teens or 20s, and rescuers said they also recovered the bodies of about a dozen young
children inside the club.
Hundreds of tearful parents and relatives crowded
outside hospitals and the morgue, seeking news about loved ones.
"Where is my son? I've been looking for hours
and I can't find him!" an unidentified woman sobbed on television, describing him so
rescue workers would recognize him.
The city government declared three days of mourning
and ordered all nightclubs closed during the New Year's holiday weekend.
Pope John Paul II expressed his condolences to
victims' families in a message sent to Argentine church officials.
The fire recalled a blaze that swept a Paraguayan
supermarket in August, killing 434 people in an Asuncion suburb.
Authorities later said the doors were ordered shut
by the store's owner to prevent looting, trapping people inside.
In a 2003 nightclub fire in West Warwick, R.I., that
killed 100 people, authorities said sparks from a band's pyrotechnic display ignited
highly flammable foam used in the club as soundproofing.
Buenos Aires club fire kills 169
A
blaze in a Buenos Aires nightclub packed with young revellers celebrating the New Year
holidays killed at least 169 people and injured 375, as a stampeding crowd was trapped by
locked exit doors, officials said yesterday.
The blaze is thought to have been caused by a flare
fired into the club's ceiling during a rock concert, sending burning debris onto the crowd
of up to 4000 people who desperately fought to flee the flames and suffocating smoke.
"The fire spread in a minute and we were a
mountain of people trying to escape," said survivor, 25, who lost a friend and a
cousin in the fire and was searching for another friend at a city hospital.
The blaze, which officials called one of Argentina's
worst disasters, may have claimed more victims because four of the club's six doors were
tied shut with wire, according to Interior Minister Anibal Fernandez.
"It appears they were condemned to walk into a
trap," Fernandez said.
Mayor Anibal Ibarra said the emergency exit appeared
to be shut "so that people wouldn't enter without paying" and firefighters had
to break it open.
Most of the victims are believed to have died from
smoke inhalation.
The rock band playing at the Republica Cromagnon
club in the gritty, run-down neighborhood of Once warned the crowd not to shoot flares due
to the fire hazard, the mayor said.
But after the first song, an hour before midnight on
Thursday, a group fired one into the highly flammable foam ceiling.
Flares and a whole array of fireworks are sold on
streets all over Latin America for the New Year holiday festivities with little
regulation.
Lists at hospitals showed that most of the victims
were in their teens and 20s, but there were also children as young as 6 among the dead and
injured.
City Hall set up an emergency center in the middle
of the night for families to find out about victims.
"The city does not remember such a grave
situation," city health secretary Alfredo Stern said.
Police said the fire was extinguished quickly, but
rescue workers spent a few hours removing people on stretchers from inside the club.
Television showed pictures of the bodies lying on
the sidewalks outside the club.
Parents first rushed to the scene desperate to find
their sons and daughters amid the chaos, but then flocked to the 14 hospitals where the
dead and injured were taken.
At a makeshift morgue in a garage beside the club,
witnesses said 30 bodies were lined up and family members were allowed to pass to identify
them.
"There was a girl who must have been around 10
years old," said a former fireman who helped in the rescue. "She was
asphyxiated poor thing, and she was burned."
The blaze was the worst in the Americas since a
supermarket fire in neighboring Paraguay last August killed nearly 400 people. The owners
are accused of closing the doors after the fire broke out to stop looting.
Many other fires have occurred in Latin America in
recent years because of fireworks.
Exactly three years ago, more than 300 people were
killed when a fire roared through a crowded shopping area in the Peruvian capital Lima.
The blaze started with an explosion at a shop selling fireworks for New Year parties.
Thursday night's Buenos Aires club fire recalled a
similar blaze in the United States in February 2003 when a pyrotechnics display at the
start of a heavy metal concert ignited sound-proofing material at a club in Rhode Island,
killing 100 people and injuring nearly 200.
Argentines Protest
as Club Fire Death Toll Climbs
Protests by families and friends of the more than
180 victims of a deadly blaze at a rock club mounted on Sunday over complaints that
authorities let it operate with locked emergency doors, inflammable soundproofing and
dangerous overcrowding.
Three days after a flare ignited the ceiling of the
Cromagnon Republic during a concert, the death toll rose by five to 182, adding to
pressure on Buenos Aires City Hall to account for its role in one of Argentina's worst
disasters.
More than 260 of the 726 injured remain
hospitalized, 117 of them in intensive care, the director of the city's emergency medical
services, Julio Salinas, told Reuters.
Although most of the victims were teenagers, some
were children and babies because the club allowed a makeshift child-care center to operate
in the women's bathroom, witnesses told police.
Late on Saturday, protests that began with a few
hundred swelled as the march went to City Hall where people chanted "Justice,
justice, justice" and called for the resignation of Mayor Anibal Ibarra.
"The government of Buenos Aires is accused of
lax regulations -- and maybe even corruption -- for allowing these death traps to
exist," Ricardo Kirschbaum, editor-in-chief of the top selling daily Clarin, wrote in
Sunday's paper.
The club had a permit for 1,100 spectators, but an
estimated 4,000 were at the concert on Thursday. The last complete inspection of the club
was in 2003, officials said.
City security secretary Juan Carlos Lopez, in charge
of inspections of public venues, accepted his responsibility in the tragedy and resigned
late Saturday to become the first political victim of the fire.
LOCKED EMERGENCY EXIT BLAMED
"There was an emergency exit the size of a
truck and if it had been open we would have some injured but not this stupid
tragedy," Lopez told local radio on Sunday.
Most of the victims died of smoke inhalation, but
some of the casualties suffered burns and injuries in the stampede.
Ibarra has closed all clubs for 15 days and banned
live concerts in them indefinitely.
Protest organizers have asked Buenos Aires residents
to show their anger later on Sunday by banging pots and pans, a popular protest method
that became famous during Argentina's economic and political crisis three years ago.
More marches are planned for Monday and Thursday
nights.
The club owner, Omar Chaban, is in police custody
and goes before a judge for questioning on Monday. He faces possible charges of
manslaughter.
The search for his three partners continues.
Police are also trying to find the three youths who
witnesses say launched the flare despite appeals from the band's lead singer to not set
off any fireworks, a common practice among Callejeros' fans.
Officials said they had concluded all the autopsies
after families protested Saturday the slow process to turn over bodies. Four had yet to be
identified and claimed by families.
Due to the criminal investigation, families are
ordered to bury rather than cremate the bodies. More than 50 burials were scheduled in the
city's two main cemeteries in sweltering summer temperatures.
Club owner arrested
in Argentina nightclub blaze
Crowds got into a shoving match with police outside
Buenos Aires' morgue as relatives tried to reclaim bodies of loved ones lost in a disco
fire, which killed 175 and injured 889.
Weary families, some of whom had kept a 36-hour
vigil outside the morgue, led a march of about 400 persons from the Cro-Magnon Republic
club, which burned before midnight Thursday, to the city morgue to demand access to their
relatives' remains.
One protest sign said: "For the dreams that
died here."
Police arrested the owner of the nightclub, where
authorities said locked exits had sealed the fate of at least 175 people, mostly
teenagers, who were killed in a blaze set off by fans tossing flares.
The blaze, one of the worst in Argentina's history,
broke out during a New Year concert by the rock group Los Callejeros and injured close to
900 people.
Some doors to the club had been "locked with
chains and padlocks," Mayor Anibal Ibarra said Friday, confirming that flares set off
during the concert had ignited the fire.
"If the emergency exit had been open, so many
people would not have died," he said.
Police late Friday arrested Omar Chaban, the owner
of the club in downtown Buenos Aires, a source at the interior ministry told AFP. The
charges against him were not immediately known.
Describing the incident as a "disaster,"
Interior Minister Anibal Fernandez said most of the 2,000 concert goers were aged 12 to
20, but that victims also included babies and children in a makeshift childcare center in
the club.
Authorities said that 102 of the 889 people injured
were in critical condition and that 18 police officers were among those hurt.
The flags of Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Paraguay
were draped across metal barricades blocking access to the fire scene. "Peru weeps
with you" was written across one. Mourners left bouquets, candles and teddy bears.
December 31 is usually one of the quietest nights of
the year in Buenos Aires, dubbed "the city that never sleeps." Almost all its
restaurants are shut and its streets completely empty as families celebrate New Year at
home.
In spite of an official ban on New Year nightlife in
Buenos Aires in observance of three days of national mourning, blasts sounded out and
fireworks lit the sky at the stroke of midnight.
As evidence mounted that a banned flare had sparked
the deadly fire, witnesses described the warnings and doorway searches meant to block the
use of firecrackers and flares, often set off at rock concerts here.
"Don't set off flares or fireworks, otherwise
we're all going to die here," Pato Fortanet, the band's singer, had told the crowd
before the show began.
A spokesman for Los Callejeros said it was the
Argentine band that attracted the highest number of flares.
A young woman who lost her husband in the blaze said
club staff had searched concert goers at the door to stop them bringing in firecrackers.
"They looked in bags, in shoes, even in our
hair. They frisked me from head to toe," she said.
"Before the concert, a staff member got on
stage and talked for at least 15 minutes to say that flares must not be set off,"
survivor Laly Reches told AFP.
"He was hissed and booed. They shouted 'cop' at
him," said Reches, still visibly shocked by her ordeal.
"When the ceiling caught on fire, we
panicked... We ran, the lights went out, but we found an exit," she said.
"My cousin Fabian grabbed my arm and my
sister's and we ran without seeing anything until we knocked against metal barricades.
Some one moved them and we stumbled onto a service entrance onto the street," she
said.
Fireworks Spark Blaze
in Buenos Aires Nightclub
Killing 175
The rock band Los Callejeros was barely two songs
into its show at a downtown club here late Thursday night when fireworks set off by
someone in the audience ignited the foam ceiling, causing a fire that killed 175 people
and injured more than 700.
Some victims were crushed in a stampede as they
tried to escape debris falling from the ceiling. Others choked on the noxious gases
generated by the burning foam, all within the space of a few minutes. One member of the
band is reported missing.
Witnesses said the club, the República Cromagnon,
was packed well beyond its 1,100-person capacity, with some survivors putting the number
at four times that limit.
City officials said emergency exits had been blocked
in violation of safety codes, contributing to the high death toll.
"Only two exits were open, the others were tied
up with wire," said Aníbal Fernández, the interior minister. "These young
people were doomed in a death trap."
On Friday afternoon, sitting on the steps of the
nearby Ramos Mejía public hospital, where many of the victims were brought, a
31-year-old construction worker, recalled the moment the club caught fire.
"It was chaos, fire everywhere, then suddenly
everything turned black when the lights went out," he said. His face was bandaged and
he was missing a front tooth lost in the struggle to flee the club. "The fireworks
were set off when the band had just started their show. The exits were closed, we had to
escape through the same door we entered, a door that seemed to keep moving farther and
farther away."
Among the victims were about a dozen young children,
a fact related both to the ever younger age of rock audiences here and to an impromptu
child-care center set up in the women's bathroom. City officials confirmed that there were
at least 13 children in critical condition in the city's hospitals. It was the worst fire
at an entertainment establishment in the country's history.
The use of unsanctioned fireworks has been a problem
at prior performances of Los Callejeros. At a concert for an audience of about 5,000 at
the Obras Sanitarias here in July, the lead singer, Pato Fontanet, had to stop the show
twice because of the amount of fireworks being set off by fans, despite heavy control by
security at the entrance. His sister and girlfriend were among the victims who perished at
the nightclub.
"Callejeros is the band to whose concerts fans
bring the largest amount of fireworks in Argentina," Martín Bizzio, the manager of
the band, said in a television interview. "Controls are very strict, but a lot
manages to get through anyhow. What you see in the shows is about 15 or 20 percent of what
they try to smuggle in. The roof was 100 percent flammable, and that's how it
happened."
Reports in the local news media said the owner of
the República Cromagnon club came out before the band went onstage, speaking to club
patrons for 10 minutes and asking them not to light fireworks. But the audience only
hissed in defiance, the reports said. He was detained by the police on Friday for
questioning.
"The place had two fire exits but our reports
tells us they were shut so tight they had to be pried open by the firemen," said
Aníbal Ibarra, the mayor of Buenos Aires.
Other reports said that one of the exit doors burst
open from the pressure of hundreds of people pressing against it, allowing those closest
to it to escape. Dozens of shoes were strewn on the floor outside one of the exit doors,
lost by people fleeing the fire as they rushed out of the building.
2005 -- gentinians are demanding justice for the young victims of the
end-of-year tragedy when a firework set off in a packed Buenos Aires discotheque killed
191 people and injured more than 600 others. 
