Exclusivo: incêndio do Edifício Joelma completa 50 anos nesta quinta-feira (1º)

Balanço Geral, the daily news programme of Brazil’s Record TV network, aired this six-minute report on February 1, 2024, the fiftieth anniversary of the Edifício Joelma fire. It is in Portuguese. The piece sets the scene of 1974 in Brazil before returning to the morning of Friday, February 1, when fire crews in São Paulo began receiving alarming calls about smoke pouring from the twelfth floor of a three-year-old, 25-storey office tower on the corner of Rua Santo Antônio and Avenida Nove de Julho.

Using the television footage that carried the disaster live across the country, the report explains how a short circuit in an air-conditioning unit started the blaze, and how wooden partitions, carpets and fabric curtains let it reach the top floor within minutes while the stairs and lifts became unusable. Veteran firefighters recall the day, one holding a piece of window panelling melted by the heat. The report gives the toll as 181 dead and some 300 injured, notes that 422 people were rescued, and follows the building through four years of rebuilding to its reopening in 1978, later under the name Edifício Praça da Bandeira.

The report contains distressing archive scenes of people trapped at the windows, and it treats them with care; its closing line notes that for many, the Joelma is still regarded as a tomb. That feeling is the root of the building’s ghost lore. Thirteen victims could never be identified and were buried without names in the São Pedro cemetery in Vila Alpina, where “the thirteen souls” became the focus of a popular devotion, complete with a legend that cemetery workers heard cries from the graves until they poured water on them. Popular tradition says the thirteen died together in a lift, a detail researchers dispute. Another legend blames a curse left by the 1948 “Well Murder,” a family killing at a house said to have stood on the site.

The documented lessons of the fire are what changed the city: the tower had a single staircase and no sprinklers, alarms or evacuation plan, and the disaster, coming less than two years after the Andraus building fire, led to sweeping reform of Brazil’s fire-safety rules. The building is a working office block today and is not open to ghost hunting.