2 months ago
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Geneva: Those who witnessed the inferno inside Le Constellation nightclub point to a single moment of celebration that brought horror to hundreds of young people in the Swiss Alps.
In a photograph of the bar reportedly taken by a survivor before the fire broke out and sent to France’s BFMTV, a woman can be seen on the shoulders of a man, holding bottles in her hands with sparklers attached.Credit: BFMTV.
A male bartender lifted a female colleague onto his shoulders as she carried a bottle of champagne through the crowd in the basement bar in the first hours of the new year.
Attached to the bottles were small fireworks – what Australians call “sparklers” – that lit up the bar.
“The sparks flew up to the ceiling and the whole thing caught fire. In a few seconds, the entire ceiling was on fire,” one witness, Julie, a young French woman, told The Times.
Another French witness, Emma, gave a similar account to news channel BFMTV about the bottles and fireworks.
“Some of the bottles were near the ceiling and it caught fire. The whole ceiling was in flames, and the fire spread really fast. It happened in seconds,” she said.
It was about 1.30am on New Year’s Day (11.30am Thursday AEDT) and young people had crowded into the Le Constellation basement to cheer the year ahead. Now, that future has been cut short for at least 40 of the revellers. Scores of others are suffering life-changing burns.
The fire was so fast that dozens could not escape. Several eyewitness accounts suggest there was only a narrow staircase out of the basement. Those who made it to the ground floor found the blaze had spread through the timber building. Some picked up tables to smash the windows to escape the flames.
Another witness, Samuel Rapp, described people scrambling over each other in the panic.
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“A lot of people were screaming, trying to escape,” he told Sky News. “It was horrible.”
Swiss authorities responded swiftly. More than 40 ambulances and a dozen helicopters were deployed to ferry the injured to hospitals. But the injuries placed a severe strain on local resources, forcing health workers to send patients to burns units in Lausanne, Zurich and Geneva.
Regional governor Mathias Reynard said the best help citizens and tourists could provide would be to avoid placing any additional strain on the hospitals. “If you want to be useful, be careful,” he said at a news conference.
Patients are likely to be transferred to hospitals in Germany, Italy and France in the next few days to ensure the best care for terrible burns.
Switzerland is shocked by this tragedy – not just at the ferocity of the fire but at the way it inflicted so much cruelty on the young. Doctors say most of the victims were aged between 15 and 25 years old. Parents rushed to the bar in the early hours of the new year to find out what had happened to their children.
What was meant to be a night of joy has brought devastation to the families and friends of the victims. This includes at least one Australian family that is receiving consular support while one of its members undergoes treatment for injuries suffered in the blaze.
Who is to blame? Swiss leaders are being cautious about the causes of the fire, given there will be an official investigation.
But the eyewitness accounts raise questions about safety at Le Constellation. The bar was so proud of the way it lit sparklers in the crowd that it promoted the practice on its social media accounts, with one video on YouTube showing waitresses carrying bottles that set off sparks.
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And the basement bar appeared to have a low ceiling; some accounts suggest it also featured noise insulation, which is often made of low-cost polyurethane, a material that easily catches alight.
There are also suggestions that the bar may have exceeded its capacity when there were obvious limits on the exits.
That is why the questions about this fire should be asked outside the Swiss borders – including in Australia. There is a grim history of nightclub fires, many linked to fireworks.
The resort town of Crans-Montana, known for its skifields in winter and golf courses in summer, probably seems like a distant and elite enclave to most onlookers. But those gathered at Le Constellation were simply doing what young revellers do in bars everywhere – until the sparks leapt to the ceiling.
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