Flames, panic as crowd fled function hall
As she has done faithfully for the last decade, Aida Alves, 47, arrived last night at the old Portuguese hall on County Street to socialize, have coffee and doughnuts, and pray the rosary.
A short while later, she was fleeing for her life.
It was the fourth day of the week-long festival of the Brotherhood of St. John's Holy Ghost, an Azorean tradition that features processions, a feast, and prayer, and about 25 people were already inside, sitting in rows before a makeshift altar of silver crowns, flags, and decorations.
Shortly before 7:30 p.m., just before the rosary was to begin, Alves said, one of the women lit a candle, and it ignited a paper flower that was part of the display. A man jumped out of his seat, grabbed a fire extinguisher from the back of the room, and tried to put the flame out.
But the fire spread. The man desperately tried to roll the decorations on the ground, but the flames shot out more, Alves said.
People started to scream, then head ed for the front door. Alves grabbed her purse and ran.
So many people crowded the doorway that no one could pass through.
``I couldn't get out. I had to stay there," Alves recalled late last night. ``I felt heat on my hair, and the skin of my arms started to swell."
Alves described a chaotic, harrowing scene, with smoke filling the hall and people growing desperate, banging on the doors. When she got out, she was so shaken she went straight home. When her husband saw her, with obvious burns on both arms, that he insisted she go to a hospital.
Alves suffered first- and second-degree burns on her arms. Last night, she milled about a few blocks from the scene of the fire, her arms wrapped in gauze, as she talked to other members of the church, still trying to absorb what had happened.
The festival features silver crowns, a reference to a 13th-century queen, who, according to legend, placed her crown on the head of a poor girl as a symbol of her desire to feed the poor.
Last night, two Catholic chaplains went to a home near the function hall around midnight, as grieving members of the Portuguese community gathered. Every few minutes, one of the women broke out in sobs, wailing into the night. 