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Throughout Sunday morning, health workers hauled bodies from the nightclub, called Kiss, to hospitals in Santa Maria, with some survivors were taken to the nearby city of Pôrto Alegre to be treated for burns. Valdeci Oliveira, a local legislator, said he saw piles of bodies in the nightclub's bathrooms after entering the venue with rescue workers.

Maj. Cleberson Braida Bastianello, a public security official in Santa Maria, said in a news conference Sunday that emergency responders had counted at least 245 dead and 48 wounded in the blaze. Witnesses who survived the blaze described a scene of mayhem inside the huge nightclub as hundreds of patrons rushed for its main exit.

"I only got out because I am strong," Ezequiel Corte Real, a 23-year-old survivor, told reporters. He said he helped others escape the blaze, as well.

The disaster in Rio Grande do Sul, a relatively prosperous state in southern Brazil, sent shock waves throughout the country. Brazilian media reported that President Dilma Rousseff canceled appointments at a summit meeting in Chile of Latin American and European leaders, to travel to Santa Maria, city of about 260,000 residents that is known for its cluster of universities.

The disaster ranks among the deadliest nightclub fires in recent memory, comparable to the 2003 blaze in Rhode Island that killed 100 people and nightclub fire in 2004 in Buenos Aires in which 194 were killed.

Witnesses said the fire was ignited around 2 a.m. after a rock band began performing for an audience numbering in the hundreds, comprised largely of students in the agronomy and veterinary medicine programs in a local university. Many of the victims died of smoke inhalation, according to emergency officials.

"The smoke spread very quickly," said Aline Santos Silva, 29, a survivor of the blaze, in comments to the GloboNews television network. "Those who were closest to the stage, where the band was playing, had the most difficulty getting out."

Brazilian television stations broadcast images of trucks carrying corpses to hospitals in Santa Maria, where family members were gathering on Sunday. Photographs taken shortly after the blaze and posted on the Web sites of local news organizations showed frantic scenes in which people on the street outside the nightclub pulled bodies from the charred venue.