CNN reported, “One waitress was standing on another waiter’s shoulders, and the bottle and the flames were just a few centimeters away from the ceiling.” So the extra height seems to have brought the sparkler closer to the ceiling than is safe.
You would need to be a circus acrobat or gymnast to stand on someone’s shoulders while holding sparkler gadgets in your hands.
Perhaps she was not standing but sitting?
Probably, with the person on the bottom holding her legs.
Perhaps those kinds of sparklers shouldn’t be near alcohol. A known flammable liquid(if I’m using the word; flammable, correctly). Anyway a liquid that will catch fire.
Not real smart.
But the poor burn victims. So terrible.
So true. I saw a YouTube video some time ago that showed just how fast a house fire can spread. It was terrifying! That’s why it’s so important to have a smoke detector in good order on every level of your house, preferably wired and interconnected so that if one goes off, they all go off.
The fire starting:
https://x.com/LeSilencieuxO/status/2006822695749693602
https://x.com/media_express_e/status/2006701136636678290?s=20
Watching that first video, yes, the fire started on the ceiling, which is consistent with the idea that it was caused by the sparkler. But the video seems to show people standing around and not heading for the exits.
I also heard on NPR that there was a woman waving around one of those bottles, while on a man’s shoulders, and may have caught streamers on fire.
Most of the time, it’s not the fire that kills, but the smoke.
But not this time, it seems.
The first thing I thought of when I read the story was Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”, which described a casino fire in Switzerland “on the Lake Geneva shoreline”. That was caused by “Some stupid with a flare gun”.
Naw. You need to be more coordinated than i am, but when our daughter was 15, she used to stand on her father’s shoulders at pyo apple orchard, to pick apples. I’m totally certain the pair of them could have walked around a bar with her holding a sparkler. She had no formal training, it’s just something the two of them would do.
Some guy at the end of it tried swatting the fire with what looked like a cloth or something; I think people were still in “somebody can deal with this” mode", not “evacuate!” mode.
I can’t find the original , but saw this quote posted on another forum:
Two survivors of the bar fire said they saw it start when a candle connected with the wooden roof of its basement.
A woman told French TV channel BFM: "During the evening, a waiter climbed onto another waiter’s shoulders.
“He was holding a birthday candle, which was very close to the ceiling, and [the ceiling] caught fire in a couple of minutes.”
Another woman said: "The staircase leading out of the nightclub was extremely narrow. There was a huge surge in the crowd.
“We managed to escape just in time.”
Police commander Frédéric Gisler confirmed the fire “started in the basement of the bar” and there was a crush as people desperately tried to get out via the single staircase.
…Yeah, a single narrow staircase leading to a crush is exactly the sort of situation likely to result in a high death toll like this. I don’t know if it’s illegal in Switzerland but it should be. Certainly the more details come out the more this sounds like somebody was ignoring all sorts of safety rules, and a lot of people just paid the price.