The Fire
On January 11, 2001, a taping of Xuxa Park was in progress on a soundstage of the Brazilian network Rede Globo with a live audience of about 300 people (most of whom were children) in attendance. As Xuxa and her dancers were performing a show-closing musical number, a small fire started in the set's mechanical "spaceship" (through which Xuxa would normally have exited the stage in another 2 minutes). For a few seconds, they continued their musical number, unaware of what was happening behind them. An alert stagehand quickly appeared with a small fire extinguisher and attempted to extinguish the flames, but suddenly the fire erupted violently, engulfing the "spaceship," and he was forced to retreat as others on stage also began to flee. The fire grew and spread quickly and intensively as children, dancers, stagehands, and audience members fled towards the exits to escape the heat, smoke, and melting plastic. Within less than a minute, the entire set was engulfed in flames.
Though camera operators and other technicians fled with the others, the cameras continued to operate and feed the videotape machines as the conflagration grew. The footage was shown frequently on Brazilian news shows for days after the fire.
Read more about this topic: Xuxa Park Fire
Famous quotes containing the word fire:
“Where the world ends
The mind is made unchanging, for it finds
Miracle, ecstasy, the impossible hope,
The flagstone under all, the fire of fires,
The roots of the world.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or three removes, when we know least about it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)