A Tragedy Deepens

Too low. The death toll from a devastating fire last Feb. 25 in the shantytown--or favela--of Vila Soco, in the southern Brazilian town of Cubatao, was simply too low. Only 86 bodies were recovered after a gasoline-fed blaze exploded into a giant fireball that looked like an atomic mushroom cloud. Yet some 9,000 people lived in Vila SocO, a patchwork of wooden shacks built on stilts over a marshy swamp. Coroner Carlos Affonso Figueiredo found it strange that no bodies of children under five years of age had been discovered among the ashes and in the hot rubble that burned 8.5 acres.

After pursuing the investigation for almost a month, Figueiredo and his colleagues confirmed what they had feared. Based on the number of shacks destroyed and the average number of people per family, Figueiredo estimated that 300 children under five must have been killed in the fire. They eventually estimated more than 500 people dead. Because the blaze was fed by a highly combustible octane that caused the fireball to reach 1,000DEG C, he deduced that the children had been incinerated. "The bodies of young children trapped in the blaze were literally cremated," he said. "And since whole families were killed, there was no one to report the children's deaths or disappearance."

Vila SocO was an accident waiting to happen. Part of the favela had been built illegally on private land near a gasoline pipeline owned by the state oil monopoly, Petrobras. The day before the fire, Petrobras had ordered the wrong pipeline to be opened, causing a leak in the pipeline that ran next to Vila SocO. Investigators contend that Petrobras failed to monitor a pressure buildup on the line and stop the leak. At the time of the explosion, shortly after midnight, gasoline had spread throughout many ditches of the shantytown, creating a liquid bomb that awaited only ignition. Petrobras admitted human error in the accident and has agreed to pay hospital costs and damages for the survivors.