Light is like water

This story was hard for me to grasp. I understand the metaphor between light and water, but I find it hard to believe that the children actually drowned. It says, "Responding to the alarm call, the firemen forced open the door to the fifth-floor apartment, and found the whole place filled with light, up to the ceiling". If light literally means water then the apartment could technically have been filled with water. But I feel like the light represents fire, and that the children thought that breaking light bulbs would bring water, because it represented the tap. However, in breaking to many light bulbs, a fire started and they all ended up burning to death in the apartment. The inability for the children to distinguish between light and water inevitably led to their demise. But the last paragraph casts doubt on my assertion, because I cannot figure out what the author means when he says that, "Totó was seated at the stern of the rowboat, glued to the oars, with his scuba mask on, searching for the lighthouse of the port until his tanks ran out of air; and Joel floated in the prow, still trying to measure the height of the north star with his sextant, and floating throughout the house were his thirty-six classmates" I feel like there is something more here than just dying in fire. There has to be a reason the author chose to portray the children like this. I just cant seem to put my finger on it. It could be that by breaking the light bulbs and opening the tap, it unleashed the children's imagination of the room being filled with water and so in their reality they thought that they were actually overflowing with water, whereas in real reality they were trapped in a burning room, but did not see it that way. This whole idea of perceptions of reality confuses me and I can not seem to distinguish between what is real and what isn't. But I am going to stand by my statement and say that the children died in a fire and not in water.