40 feared dead in US rave party fire

24 killed and dozens missing in warehouse inferno

OAKLAND // Fire crews in California yesterday searched the charred remains of a warehouse gutted by a blaze during a rave party.

Officials said the death toll could reach 40. Dozens of people were missing in the Friday night blaze in Oakland near San Francisco. Twenty- four people have been confirmed dead.

Artists used the converted two-storey warehouse as a living and work space. But they had neither the licence for this nor for the electronic dance party under way when the fire broke out, officials said. The cause of the fire was not yet known.

Firefighters said the building seemed to have no sprinklers or smoke detectors.

Flames shot through the roof as the fire burned for hours and thick smoke billowed into the sky.

The roof collapsed on to the second floor, which officials said was connected to the ground floor only by a makeshift system of wooden pallets.

Firefighters had to withdraw from the building to shore it up when part of the fragile structure began to move.

Sgt Ray Kelly of the Alameda county sheriff’s department said about two dozen people who were reported missing had been found.

But at least two dozen remained missing, he said.

“We don’t know how far into the process we are because we don’t absolutely have a number of people that we know are deceased inside of there,” Sgt Kelly said.

An official at the sheriff’s office said that the death toll could rise to 40 or higher.

Most of those who perished in the blaze were thought to have died on the upper floor of the warehouse known as the Oakland Ghost Ship. The electronic dance music party was attended by between 50 and 100 people.

The sheriff’s office station in Oakland became a centre for relatives of the missing. Daniel Vega told the San Francisco Chronicle he was looking for his brother Alex and his girlfriend, who had said they were going to a rave in Oakland. “If he is dead, if he is in the rubble, fine, I’ll get over it. But I just want to find him,” he said.

The deadliest nightclub fire in the United States in recent decades occurred in 2003, when pyrotechnic effects by a rock band set off an inferno at a nightclub in Rhode Island, killing about 100 people.