COMPUTATIONAL SIMULATION OF THE KISS NIGHTCLUB FIRE: IMPACT OF EMERGENCY EXIT WIDTH ON EVACUATION SAFETY

Major fire disasters highlight the decisive role of evacuation route design. The Kiss Nightclub fire (Santa Maria, Brazil, 2013), which resulted in 242 deaths, demonstrates how bottlenecks and insufficient exit capacity can critically affect outcomes. This study applies computational evacuation modeling using the Fuga v.2.0 program to simulate parametric evacuation scenarios of the nightclub, testing simplified layouts and different exit widths. A simulated population of 1,000 agents was considered, incorporating discretized anthropometric body sizes, random initial positions, and realistic movement parameters. Results indicate that even compliance with the 4.4 m minimum exit width prescribed by ABNT NBR 9077:1993 would not have ensured safe evacuation under the conditions of the tragedy. Simulations show that an exit width on the order of 8.8 m would have been required for the Required Safe Egress Time (RSET) to approach the Available Safe Egress Time (ASET), estimated between 1 and 2 minutes due to rapid smoke development. Furthermore, internal barriers reduced the effective width to approximately 1.65 m, producing RSET values up to five times greater than the reference ASET. These findings highlight the relevance of performance-based assessment and computational evacuation modeling as complementary tools for evaluating evacuation safety in complex building configurations.