The Evacuation of Kiss Nightclub Fire

It is a fact that nightclub’s fires can, unfortunately, cause many injuries and casualties. Canecão Mineiro and Kiss, in Brazil, The Station, in US, Republic Cromañon, in Argentina and Lame Horse, in Russia, are examples of nightclub’s fires with a lot of victims. All these cases had the same pattern, fire outbroken in the insulation materials and developed very fast in the interior, showing the weaknesses of these spaces in case of fire. Emergency exits, that are one of the fundamental building safety measures, showed to be inadequate and the evacuation of the occupants was not appropriate. In a nutshell, they must provide a quick and safe exit for the occupants of a building, as well as allowing rescue teams to enter via the least unhealthy route possible. In Kiss nightclub fire, emergency exits proved to be ineffective in fulfilling these objectives, especially when it came to evacuating people. Videos showed a chaotic evacuation during the fire. This paper reveals and analyses the violations and vulnerabilities of the emergency exits in Kiss nightclub fire, correlating the existing non-conformities with the causes of injuries and deaths. Using appropriate fire investigation methodologies, data gathering, hypothesis selection and computer simulations of fire and evacuation, it was possible to reveal the causes of injury and death correlated with the violations and vulnerabilities of the emergency exits, serving the results for preventing identical future cases.