On the Boate Kiss Fire and the Brazilian Safety Legislation - What we can learn

Abstract

Brazil was recently the scenario of a great tragedy in the fire at Kiss nightclub, where 242 people were killed. The starting point of the fire was the use of a pyrotechnic device over an acoustic coating made of polyurethane foam. The causalities were caused mainly by asphyxia and inhalation of toxic gases in a very fast smoke expansion. However, several additional causes contributed to the amount of damage and human losses. The accident investigations emphasized the necessity to discuss details in the applicable Brazilian legislation. In this work, the tragedy of Kiss nightclub is presented and the some of their main aspects discussed. The Brazilian standard (ABNT NBR 9077) to determine the dimension of the emergency exits is also presented. It was found that, in spite of the configurations of Kiss nightclub have had a fundamental role in tragedy, the current Brazilian standard was not appropriate for the design of such an environment and should not have been used. Moreover, clear and more rigorous standards also need to be further discussed, particularly for non-adaptive situations. At the end, some considerations are made in order to improve the general fire prevention standards about dimensioning of emergency exits.

The influence of the location of emergency exits over the distance to be covered to the exit of an environment

“…11a) In addition to the compliance with legal codes, safety indexes such as the Gretener method or others (KAISER, 1980;LUNDIN, 2005;HAHNEMANN;CORRÊA;RABBANI, 2017) can also be used to determine, or at least to estimate the level of security of an environment. Obviously, safety indices, or even performance-based projects COELHO FILHO, 2007;SHI;SHI;REN, 2011;SPINARDI, 2016), should always be used within their limits and by professionals who fully understand them, at the risk of artificially releasing spaces that could be potentially very dangerous (CHOW, 2013;BRAGA;MOITA, 2017). The value of da can be used as an element to support this kind of safety index, or introduced as a complementary index in performance-based projects.…”

“…As it usually happens in these tragedies, there were many reasons that contributed to the disaster and its dimension. One of these points is the need of review, or further discussions, of the applicable legal codes (SILVA FILHO et al, 2013;BRAGA, MOITA, 2017). With regard to the existing codes, a point that should be brought into discussion is the determination of positioning, size and quantities of exits that are necessary to ensure "safety" in an environment such as this.…”

Influence of committed volunteers on helping behavior in emergency evacuations

“…Emergency evacuation simulations have received much attention since Helbing et al [1] characterized collective phenomena in escape panic based on numerical simulations of self-driven many-particles. Some studies have stated that when people are escaping from the place of danger, they tend to move faster than their normal speed and behave in an individualistic manner, which may lead to people pushing each other [1][2][3][4]. In the majority of studies, numerical simulations of emergency evacuation were developed based on such assumptions.…”