Ufa tragedy. Ashinskaya tragedy: two trains and a gas leak. Fatal coincidence of circumstances
On the night of June 3-4, 1989, a large amount of flammable gas-gasoline mixture accumulated on the Asha-Ulu-Telyak railway section near Ufa due to a pipeline break on the train track. At the moment of the oncoming passage of two passenger trains, an accidental spark provoked a powerful explosion. Almost 600 people died.
With the beginning of the perestroika era, the number of serious disasters and accidents in the USSR increased sharply. Every few months, one or another terrible event took place, claiming many lives. In just a few years, two nuclear-powered submarines sank, the Admiral Nakhimov steamer sank, Chernobyl nuclear power plant, earthquake in Armenia, one after another followed by railway accidents. One got the feeling that both technology and nature rebelled at the same time.
But often it was not the failure of technology, but the human factor that led to irreparable consequences. The most common slovenliness. Responsible employees seemed to not give a damn about all job descriptions. Less than two years before the accident near Ufa, four serious accidents on the railways occurred one after another, resulting in considerable casualties. On August 7, 1987, at the Kamenskaya station, a freight train accelerated too much, could not brake and crumple a passenger train standing at the station, as a result of which more than a hundred people died. The carriages of train No. 237 Moscow - Kharkov, which crashed at the Elnikovo station of the Belgorod region.
The cause of the disaster was the gross violation of instructions by several employees at once. On June 4, 1988, a train carrying explosives exploded in Arzamas. More than 90 people died. In August of the same year, the high-speed train "Aurora", following the route Moscow - Leningrad, crashed due to the gross negligence of the road master. 31 people died. In October 1988, a freight train crashed and exploded in Sverdlovsk, which killed 4 people and injured more than 500. Human factor played a key role in most of these incidents.
It seemed that the wave of disasters and accidents should have caused a much more serious and responsible attitude towards job descriptions and safety standards. But, as it turned out, this did not happen, and new nightmarish events were not long in coming.
The ill-fated pipeline
In 1984, the PK-1086 pipeline was built along the route Western Siberia - Ural - Volga region. Initially, it was intended for the transportation of oil, but shortly before its commissioning, it was decided to replace the oil with a liquefied gas-gasoline mixture. Since it was originally planned to transport oil through it, the pipeline had a pipe diameter of 720 mm. Re-profiling for the transport of the mixture required replacement of pipes. But due to the reluctance to spend money on replacing the already laid line, they did not change anything.
Although the pipeline passed through populated regions and crossed with railways several times, in order to save money, it was decided not to install an automatic telemetry system, which made it possible to quickly diagnose possible leaks. Instead, linemen and helicopters were used to measure the concentration of gas in the atmosphere. However, later they were also abolished and, as it turned out, no one watched the pipeline at all, because it was a pity for money. The high authorities decided that it was much cheaper not to spend energy and money on diagnosing problems, but to shift it onto the shoulders of local residents. They say that concerned residents will inform about the leak, then we will work, and so let everything go as it goes, why spend money on this.
Already after the start of the pipeline, it suddenly became clear that someone had overlooked somewhere and the pipeline was carried out in violation of the rules. In one of the three-kilometer sections, the pipe passed less than a kilometer from the settlement, which was prohibited by the instructions. As a result, I had to make a detour. Excavation work was carried out precisely in the area where the leak later occurred, leading to the explosion.
Excavation work on the site was carried out with the involvement of excavators. During the work, one of the excavators damaged the pipe, which no one noticed. After installing the bypass, the pipe was immediately buried. That was a gross violation of the instructions, which required an obligatory check of the integrity of the site where the repair work was carried out. The workers did not check the strength of the site, the bosses also did not control their work. The acceptance certificate was signed without looking, without any inspections of the site, which was also unacceptable.
It was in this section of the pipeline, which was damaged during work, that a gap formed during operation. A gas leak through it led to the tragedy.
Another negligence
A still from the documentary "Highway". Construction of the Druzhba oil pipeline.However, the disaster could have been avoided if not for another portion of the staff's disregard for their duties. On June 3, at approximately 9 pm, the pipeline operators received a message from the Minnibaevsk gas processing plant about a sharp drop in pipeline pressure and a decrease in the rate of mixture flow.
However, the attendants who worked that evening did not bother. Firstly, the control panel was still more than 250 kilometers from the site and they could not immediately check it. Secondly, the operator was in a hurry to go home and was afraid of being late for the bus, so he did not leave any instructions to the shift workers, saying only that the pressure at one of the sections had dropped and it was necessary to "turn on the gas".
Operators on the night shift increased the pressure. The leak appears to have existed for a long time, but the damage to the pipe was negligible. However, after the pressure increase, new damage occurred in the problem area. As a result of the damage, a gap of almost two meters was formed.
One of the sections of the Trans-Siberian Railway passed less than a kilometer from the leak. The leaking mixture settled in a lowland not far from the railway tracks, forming a kind of gas cloud. The slightest spark was enough to turn the site into a fiery hell.
During these three hours, while the gas was accumulating near the highway, trains passed through the site several times. Some train drivers informed the dispatcher about the strong gas contamination in the area. However, the railway dispatcher did not take any measures, since he had no connection with the pipeline operators, and at his own risk and risk did not dare to slow down the movement on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
At this time, two trains were moving towards each other. One went from Novosibirsk to Adler, the other returned in the opposite direction, from Adler to Novosibirsk. Actually, their meeting at this site was not scheduled. But the train, traveling from Novosibirsk, unplanned delayed at one of the stops due to the fact that one of the pregnant passengers had contractions.
Crash
At about 1:10 a.m. on June 4 (it was still late in the evening on June 3 in Moscow), two trains met at the site. They were already beginning to disperse when there was a violent explosion. Its power was such that the column of flame was observed for tens of kilometers from the epicenter. And in the city of Asha, located 11 kilometers from the explosion, almost all residents were awakened, since the blast wave knocked out windows in many houses.
The explosion site was in a hard-to-reach area. There were no settlements in the immediate vicinity, moreover, there were forests around, which made it difficult for vehicles to travel. Therefore, the first teams of doctors did not arrive immediately. In addition, according to the recollections of the doctors who first arrived at the scene of the disaster, they were shocked, because they did not expect to see anything like it. They were on a call to a passenger carriage fire and were prepared for a certain number of victims, but not for the apocalyptic picture that appeared before their eyes. One might think that they were in the epicenter of an atomic bomb explosion.
The explosion power was about 300 tons of TNT equivalent. The entire forest was destroyed within a radius of several kilometers. Instead of trees, there were flaming sticks sticking out of the ground. Several hundred meters of railroad tracks were destroyed. The rails were twisted or missing altogether. The overhead supports were knocked down or badly damaged within a radius of several kilometers from the explosion. Things, elements of carriages, smoldering scraps of blankets and mattresses, fragments of bodies lay everywhere.
In total, there were 38 carriages in two trains, 20 in one train and 18 in the other. Several cars were twisted beyond recognition, the rest were engulfed in flames both outside and inside. Some of the cars were simply thrown from the tracks onto the embankment by an explosion.
When the monstrous scale of the tragedy became clear, all doctors, firefighters, policemen, and soldiers were urgently summoned from all settlements in the vicinity. They were followed by local residents who helped in whatever way they could. The victims were taken by cars to Asha's hospitals, from where they were transported by helicopters to clinics in Ufa. Experts from Moscow and Leningrad began to arrive there the next day.
Both trains were "resort" trains. The season had already begun, whole families were heading south, so the trains were overcrowded. In total, both trains had more than 1,300 people, including both passengers and train crew workers. More than a quarter of the passengers were children. Not only those traveling with their parents, but also going to pioneer camps. In Chelyabinsk, a carriage was attached to one of the trains, in which the hockey players of the Chelyabinsk Traktor youth team were traveling south.
According to various estimates, from 575 to 645 people died. This spread is explained by the fact that no separate tickets were issued for young children at that time, so the death toll could have been more than the officially announced 575 people. In addition, hares could have been on the train. Tickets for "resort" trains were sold out quickly and not everyone was enough, so there was an unspoken practice of travel in the compartment of conductors. Of course, for a fee to the guides themselves. Almost a third of those killed, 181 people, are children. Of the ten hockey players from Traktor who rode in a trailer car, only one young man survived. Alexander Sychev received serious back burns, but was able to recover, return to sports and perform at the highest level until 2009.
More than 200 people died on the spot. The rest died already in hospitals. More than 620 people were injured. Almost all of them received serious burns, and many were left disabled. Only a few dozen lucky ones managed to survive and not receive serious damage.
Consequences
On the afternoon of June 4, Mikhail Gorbachev arrived at the crash site, accompanied by members of the government commission to investigate the accident, headed by Gennady Vedernikov. The Secretary General said the disaster was possible due to irresponsibility, disorganization and mismanagement officials.
This was already a period of publicity, so this disaster, unlike many others, was not hushed up and was covered in the media. mass media... In terms of its consequences, the accident near Ufa became the largest disaster in the history of Russian railways. Almost as many people became its victims as died during the entire existence of railways in Russian Empire(over 80 years).
At first, the version of the terrorist attack was seriously considered, but later it was abandoned in favor of a gas explosion due to a pipeline leak. However, it was never found out what exactly caused the explosion: a cigarette butt thrown out of the train window or an accidental spark from the pantograph of one of the electric locomotives.
The accident had such a resonance that this time the investigation demonstrated with all its might that it intended to involve all the culprits, not looking at their merits. At first it really seemed that the pursuit of the "switchmen" would not be enough. The investigation was interested in very high-ranking officials, up to the deputy minister oil industry Shahen Dongaryan.
In the course of the investigation, it turned out that the pipeline was left practically unattended. In order to save money, almost all diagnostic enterprises were canceled, from the telemetry system to the site crawlers. In fact, the line was ownerless, no one really followed it.
As often happens, they started out very cheerfully, but then things stalled. Soon, all sorts of political and economic cataclysms began, associated with the collapse of the USSR, and the catastrophe gradually began to be forgotten. The first court session in the case took place not in the USSR, but in Russia in 1992. As a result, the materials were sent for further investigation, and the investigation itself abruptly changed the vector and high-ranking persons disappeared from among the defendants in the case. And the main defendants were not those who operated the pipeline in violation of basic safety requirements, but the workers who repaired the site.
In 1995, six years after the tragedy, a new trial took place. The accused on it were the workers of the repair brigade, who made the withdrawal at the site, as well as their superiors. They were all found guilty. Several people were immediately amnestied, the rest were given short sentences, but not in a camp, but in a colony-settlement. The lenient sentence went almost unnoticed. Over the past six years, many cataclysms have occurred in the country, and the terrible catastrophe near Ufa has faded into the background during this time.
There is still debate about the cause of the explosion. It may have been an accidental electrical spark. Or maybe someone's cigarette worked as a detonator, because some of the passengers could have gone out to smoke at night ...
But how did the gas leak start? According to the official version, during construction in October 1985, the pipeline was damaged by an excavator bucket. At first it was just corrosion, but over time, a crack appeared from constant stress. It opened only 40 minutes before the accident, and by the time the trains passed, a sufficient amount of gas had already accumulated in the lowland.
In any case, it was the pipeline builders who were found guilty of the accident. Responsibility was borne by seven people, among whom were officials, foremen and workers.
But there is another version, according to which the leak occurred two to three weeks before the disaster. Apparently, under the influence of "stray currents" from the railway, an electrochemical reaction began in the pipe, which led to corrosion. First, a small hole formed through which gas began to flow. Gradually, it expanded to a crack.
By the way, the drivers of the trains passing this section reported about the gas pollution a few days before the accident. A few hours before it, the pressure in the pipeline dropped, but the problem was solved simply - they increased the gas supply, which further exacerbated the situation.
So, most likely, the main reason for the tragedy was elementary negligence, the usual Russian hope for "maybe" ...
The pipeline was not rebuilt. Subsequently, he was eliminated. A memorial was erected at the site of the Ashinskaya disaster in 1992. Relatives of the victims come here every year to honor their memory.
27 years ago, one of the worst railroad disasters took place on the 1710 km of the Trans-Siberian Railway. According to various estimates, the tragedy claimed the lives of 575 to 645 people, including 181 children, 623 people were left disabled. "AiF-Chelyabinsk" restored the chronology of events and listened to eyewitness accounts.
19:03 (local time)
Express train №211 Novosibirsk - Adler departed from Chelyabinsk.
The train arrived in Chelyabinsk with a delay of one and a half hours. At the Chelyabinsk-Glavny station, carriage # 0, in which the pupils of school # 107 and the Traktor 73 youth hockey team, were traveling, is hooked into the tail of the train, while for safety reasons the carriage with the children should be at the head of the train. There are 20 carriages in the train.
22:00
The train crew of one of the passing trains warns the dispatcher about the smell of gas in the area of 1710 km. The movement is not stopped, it was decided to deal with the problem in the morning.
23:41
Fast train # 212 Adler - Novosibirsk departs from Ufa. The delay of the train at the time of arrival in Ufa was more than an hour. Consists of 17 cars.
0:51
Express train # 211 arrives at Asha station. Before Ashi, the train was traveling with courier speed, and the schedule was only 7 minutes behind. But here the train stayed longer than expected: one of the little passengers had a fever.
1:05
Express train # 212 followed the Ulu-Telyak station along a side track, overtaking a freight train with oil products.
1:07
The pressure in the pipeline drops. Under influence high temperature on the street (then there was a thirty-degree heat) about 70% of the liquid hydrocarbons that had time to flow out of the pipe passed into gaseous state... The mixture turned out to be heavier than air, it began to fill the lowland.
1:13
Two trains enter a dense white cloud. The railway turned out to be in the very center of a continuous gas contamination zone (the total area of the zone is about 250 hectares).
1:14
An explosion occurs. Presumably, a spark from the pantograph of one of the locomotives detonates the gas mixture. A fire starts. Voltage disappears from the contact network, the railway alarm goes out. The explosion was so powerful that the skins of the passenger cars scattered 6 km, within a radius of 12 km from the epicenter, glass in houses was knocked out.
The explosion threw the cars off the tracks. Photo: Photo from dloadme.net
“My cousin, the same age, was staying with my grandmother in the village of UK Ashinskiy region, about 6-7 km in a straight line to the site of the tragedy. At the entrance to the house she had an oak door with a forged powerful hook. She always put it on the loop. When the blast wave passed, this hook bent and the door swung open in a split second. My grandmother and my brother jumped up in fright. We were then 13 years old ", - tells the reader of "AiF" Alexey.
1:20
Local residents begin to come to the aid of passengers. On carts, cars, buses, they carry people to Asha.
1:45
There is a call to the control panel 03 of the ambulance service in Ufa: "A carriage is on fire in Ulu-Telyak!" The preparation of places in the hospitals of Ufa and Chelyabinsk begins. Soon it becomes known that almost the entire composition has burned out. Ambulances hardly make their way to the scene of the tragedy, being guided by the huge glow of the fire, which can be seen from tens of kilometers away.
2:30
The first fire brigades and ambulances from the nearest settlements begin to arrive at the explosion site. Local residents help doctors disassemble the bodies of the dead and wounded.
5:00
Fire and recovery trains arrive at 1710 km. But they could not start repairing the canvas right away. The fire still continued around.
“I lived in Zlatoust, at that time I had just finished my training as an assistant driver of an electric locomotive and was a freelance correspondent for a newspaper. Early in the morning they woke me up with a request to go to the crash site and collect information about the Zlatoust people who were traveling on these trains. The first thing that I saw on the spot was a fallen and burnt forest. The smell of burning and ash in the air. Descended from the mountain to the railway tracks through this burnt forest. There was a mess of trains under the mountain at the site of the tracks ", - recalls Yuri Rusin.
7:00
By this time, all the living have already been taken to the medical institutions of the Ulu-Telyak station, Ashi, pos. Iglino, Katav-Ivanovsk. From there, the heaviest were sent to Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Moscow by helicopter. The explosion site is cordoned off.
It is difficult to talk about what and how it happened, - says Yuri Rusin. - Helicopters landed and took off constantly. There were a lot of people in the hospitals looking for their loved ones. The lists were incomplete and changes were constantly being made. Some of the victims were unable to give their name, or pronounced it with difficulty and the doctors wrote it down with errors. But the worst thing was when the person's data were on the lists of the living, loved ones sighed with relief, and after a while they received the terrible news of death. And at the scene of the accident, the military worked at that time, sifting through the earth to find the remains of human bodies.
8:00
There is a call to donate blood on the radio. First of all, those who survived the burn disease were accepted, their blood is the most valuable. Doctors recall that only residents of Asha donated about 140 liters in the first hours.
There were many children among the victims. Photo: AiF / Photo by Alexander Firsov
“At that time I was a novice traumatologist, I came to the burn center in March 1989, and in June it all happened. And I had to apply everything that I learned at the medical institute - practically in combat conditions. This day on June 4 was remembered for the fact that it was very hot, sunny, dry, and the influx of people with injuries was almost three times more than usual. At that time I worked in the emergency room of hospital No. 6. Usually, if forty people come in for a shift, about 120 people applied that day. When I came to the emergency room, I heard that the burn center was being reared, everyone was being discharged ... We realized that some kind of misfortune had happened, but nothing concretely was known yet. Then it was decided that all the burns would be collected in one place, and in this seven-story medical building of the 6th hospital, they began to vacate all departments, all rooms. In fact, this whole building has been turned into one big burn center ", - recalls Mikhail Korostelev, plastic surgeon, combustiologist, doctor of the highest category.
16:00
The fire was finally extinguished, all the centers were extinguished. Work has begun on the restoration of the railway track.
21:00
New rails were hastily laid. The first trains started on the Asha - Ulu-Telyak section.
“I spent more than three days at the scene of the tragedy, but there was no fatigue. At the headquarters at the crash site, I was offered to fly to Chelyabinsk. We flew in two helicopters. In one a girl, in another a boy, they were evacuated to a burn center. We landed at the airport, there were a lot of ambulances. Unfortunately, one of the children died while in the air. Before the helicopter took off, a man approached me and asked me to take a large icon with me. I asked him why take it out somewhere? The answer was simple: "Just take it, and then you will figure it out yourself." This icon was in my house for three months, then something prompted, and I handed it over to the church under construction in Zlatoust ", - tells Yuri Rusin.
A memorial was erected at the site of the tragedy, where the relatives of the victims visit every year. Photo: Official site of HC "Tractor"
“I remember a team of British doctors arrived: surgeons, anesthesiologists, psychiatrists. They worked, as they say, to their full height: they did operations, took part in detours, shifts. They came with their instruments, supplies, even then they had disposable syringes, and we still continued to boil the syringes ... For the first 10 days after the disaster, all the doctors in the center worked for wear and tear, with a break only for a short nap. After 10 days, I just collapsed and slept for almost a day. Then - back to work. After 10 days, the main crazy fuss ended, the rhythm of work was slowly built up, all the inspectors left. In August, they began to repair the departments in this building, at the end of September the last victims were discharged, " Mikhail Korostelev shares his memories.
“About a week or two after the explosion, we went in the morning with my parents by train. It was terribly scary. Scorched hectares. The train stopped and honked for a long time. It became scary from the scale of the tragedy. All the people in the carriage were silent ", - our reader Alexey will remember.
The railway from the first day of its existence has become a source of increased danger. Trains run over people, bump into each other and derail. However, on the night of June 3–4, 1989, a railway accident occurred near Ufa, which had no analogues either in Russian or in world history. However, then the cause of the accident was not the actions of the railway workers, and not the damage to the tracks, but something completely different, far from the railway - an explosion of gas escaping from a nearby pipeline.
Object: 1,710 km of the Trans-Siberian railway, the Asha - Ulu-Telyak section, the Kuibyshev railway, 11 km from the Asha station, the Iglinsky district of the Bashkir ASSR. 900 meters from the Siberia-Ural-Volga region product pipeline (pipeline).
Victims: 575 people died (258 at the accident site, 317 in hospitals), 623 people were injured. According to other sources, 645 people died.
Causes of the disaster
We know for sure what caused the train disaster near Ufa on June 4, 1989 - a volumetric explosion of gas that escaped from the pipeline through a crack 1.7 meters long and accumulated in the lowland along which the Trans-Siberian Railway lines pass. However, no one will say why the gas mixture flared up, and there is still debate about what led to the formation of a crack in the pipe and a gas leak.
As for the immediate cause of the explosion, the gas could have ignited from an accidental spark that slipped between the pantograph and the contact wire, or in any other unit of electric locomotives. But it is possible that the gas also exploded from a cigarette (after all, there were many smokers on the train with 1284 passengers, and some of them could go out to smoke at 1 am), but most experts are inclined to the "spark" version.
As for the reasons for the gas leak from the pipeline, everything is much more complicated. According to the official version, the pipeline was a "time bomb" - it was damaged by an excavator bucket during construction in October 1985, and under the influence of constant loads a crack appeared at the damaged site. According to this version, a crack in the pipeline opened only 40 minutes before the accident, and during this time a lot of gas accumulated in the lowland.
Since this version became official, the pipeline builders - several officials, foremen and workers (seven people in total) - were found guilty of the accident.
According to another version, the gas leak began much earlier - two or three weeks before the disaster. First, a micro-fistula appeared in the pipe - a small hole through which gas began to leak. Gradually, the hole widened and grew into a long crack. The fistula is probably caused by corrosion caused by an electrochemical reaction under the influence of "stray currents" from the railroad.
It should be noted that there are several other factors that are in one way or another associated with the occurrence of an emergency. First of all, the norms were violated during the construction and operation of the pipeline. Initially, it was conceived as an oil pipeline with a diameter of 750 mm, but later, when the pipeline was actually built, it was redesigned into a product pipeline for transporting liquefied gas-petrol mixture. This could not be done, since the operation of product pipelines with a diameter of over 400 mm is prohibited by all norms. However, this was ignored.
According to experts, this terrible accident could have been avoided. For a few more days, the drivers of locomotives passing along this section reported increased gas pollution, but these messages were ignored. Also, in this section of the pipeline several hours before the accident, the gas pressure dropped, but the problem was resolved simply by increasing the gas supply, which, as it is now clear, only exacerbated the situation. As a result, no one found out about the leak, and an explosion soon thundered.
It is interesting that there is also a conspiracy version of the causes of the disaster (how can we go without it!). Some "experts" claim that the explosion was nothing more than a sabotage by the American special services. And this was one of the accidents that was part of the secret American program for the collapse of the USSR. This version does not stand up to criticism, but it turned out to be very "tenacious" and today it has many supporters.
A lot of shortcomings, ignorance of technical problems, bureaucracy and elementary negligence - that's true reasons railway accident near Ufa on the night of June 3 to 4, 1989.
Chronicle of events
The chronicle of events can begin from the moment when the driver of one of the trains passing along the Asha-Ulu-Telyak section reported an increased gas pollution, which, in his opinion, was dangerous. It was about ten o'clock in the evening local time. However, the message was either ignored by the dispatchers, or simply did not have time to reach the responsible officials.
At 1:14 local time, two trains met in a lowland filled with a "gas lake" and an explosion occurred. It was not just an explosion, but a volumetric explosion, which is known to be the most destructive type of chemical explosions. The gas ignited at once in the entire volume, and in this fireball the temperature for a moment rose to 1000 degrees, and the length of the flame front reached almost 2 kilometers.
The disaster took place in the taiga, far from large settlements and roads, so help could not come quickly. The residents of the village of Asha, located 11 km away, were the first to come to the scene of the accident, and they later played a big role in rescuing the victims - they looked after the sick and generally provided all possible assistance.
A few hours later, rescuers began to arrive at the crash site - the soldiers of the civil defense battalion were the first to start work, and then the brigades of rescue trains joined them. The military carried out the evacuation of the injured, cleared the rubble, and restored the tracks. The work proceeded quickly (fortunately, at the beginning of June the nights are bright and the dawn comes early), and by morning only a forest burnt out within a kilometer radius and scattered carriages spoke of the accident. All the victims were taken to hospitals in Ufa, and the remains of the dead were removed during the day on June 4, and were delivered by cars to the Ufa morgues.
The work on the restoration of the tracks (after all, this is the Transsib, its stopping for a long time is fraught with the most serious problems) were completed in a few days. But for many more days and weeks, doctors fought for the lives of seriously wounded people, and relatives, with tears in their eyes, tried to identify their loved ones in the burnt fragments ...
Consequences
According to various estimates, the force of the explosion ranged from 250 - 300 (the official version) to 12,000 tons of TNT equivalent (recall that the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 16 kilotons).
The glow of this monstrous explosion was visible at a distance of up to 100 km, the shock wave knocked out windows in many houses of the Asha village at a distance of 11 km. The explosion destroyed about 350 meters of railway tracks and 3 km of the contact network (30 supports were destroyed and overturned), about 17 km of overhead communication lines were damaged.
Two locomotives and 37 cars were damaged, 11 cars were thrown off the tracks. Almost all the cars burned out, many of them were crumpled, some of the cars lacked a roof and skin. And several carriages were bent like bananas - it is difficult to imagine what force the explosion had to throw off the road in a moment and so mutilate the multi-ton carriages.
The explosion started a fire that covered an area of over 250 hectares.
The ill-fated pipeline was also damaged. It was decided not to restore it, and soon it was liquidated.
The explosion claimed 575 lives, including 181 children. Another 623 people were seriously injured and remained disabled of various categories. 258 people died on the spot, but no one can claim that these are exact numbers: people were literally torn apart by an explosion, their bodies mixed with earth and twisted metal, and most of the remains found were not bodies, but only mutilated body fragments. And no one knows how many dead remained under the hastily restored railway track.
Another 317 people died in hospitals within days of the accident. Many people received burns of 100% of the body surface, fractures and other injuries (including traumatic amputation of limbs), and therefore simply had no chance of survival.
Current situation
Today, in the place where 24 years ago an explosion thundered of a monstrous force, taiga and silence, broken by the passing freight and passenger trains. However, the electric trains going from Ufa to Asha do not just pass by - they certainly stop at the 1710th kilometer platform, built here a few years after the disaster.
In 1992, a memorial was erected next to the platform in memory of the victims of the disaster. At the foot of this eight-meter-high monument, you can see several road signs torn from the carriages during the explosion.
Warn and prevent
One of the reasons for the disaster was the violation of the norms for the operation of product pipelines - there were no leak control sensors on the pipe, and a visual inspection by the linemen was not carried out either. But something else was more dangerous: the pipeline had 14 dangerous encounters (less than 1 kilometer) and intersections with iron and by road... The problematic pipeline was dismantled, but the problem was not resolved - tens of thousands of kilometers of pipelines were laid in the country, and it is impossible to keep track of every meter of these pipes.
However, real steps to prevent similar disasters in the future were taken 15 years after the accident: in 2004, on the instructions of OAO Gazprom, a system was developed to control the crossings of trunk pipelines across roads (SKP 21), which has been implemented since 2005 to the present day. pipelines of Russia.
And now it remains to be hoped that modern automation will not allow a disaster like the Ufa one to be repeated.
Original taken from schnause at the age of 25 June 4, 1989 Disaster in Chelyabinsk.
June 4, 2014 marks the 25th anniversary of the disaster in the railway transport, monstrous in scale and in terms of victims. The disaster on the track Asha - Ulu Telyak is the largest disaster in the history of Russia and the USSR that occurred on June 4, 1989, 11 km from the city of Asha. At the time of the passage of two passenger trains, a powerful explosion of an unlimited cloud of fuel-air mixture occurred as a result of an accident on the Siberia-Ural-Volga region pipeline passing nearby. 575 people died (according to other sources 645), more than 600 were injured.
The catastrophe is considered the largest in the history of the USSR and Russia.
There were 1284 passengers on trains No. 211 Novosibirsk-Adler (20 cars) and No. 212 Adler-Novosibirsk (18 cars), of which 383 were children and 86 were train and locomotive crews.
The train from Novosibirsk that night was late for technical reasons, and the oncoming train stopped at an intermediate station shortly before the tragedy for an urgent disembarkation - the woman started giving birth right in the carriage.
Significant passengers traveling to Adler were already looking forward to a quiet vacation at sea. Those who, on the contrary, had already returned from vacation, rode towards them. The explosion, which thundered in the middle of the night, experts estimate as the equivalent of an explosion of three hundred tons of TNT. According to unofficial data, the power of the explosion in Ulu-Telyak was approximately the same as in Hiroshima - about 12 kilotons.
The explosion destroyed 38 carriages and two electric locomotives. 11 cars were thrown off the tracks by the shock wave, of which 7 were completely burned out. The remaining 26 cars were burned on the outside and burned out inside. Within a radius of three kilometers around the epicenter, century-old trees were felled.
Destroyed 350 meters of railways, 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines. The fire that broke out during the explosion covered an area of about 250 hectares. Later, the investigation will find out that the primary cause of the gas leak and the explosion was the poor-quality welding of the gas pipeline. As a result - a violation of the tightness of the seams. Gas is heavier than air, and there is a large depression in this place. An explosive mixture was formed and the trains entered a completely gas-polluted zone, where there was a rather small spark for a powerful explosion.
During operation, in the period from 1985 to 1989, 50 major accidents and failures occurred on the product pipeline, which, however, did not lead to human casualties. After the accident near Ufa, the product pipeline was not restored and was liquidated.
Eyewitness memories.
June 4, 1989. It was very hot these days. The weather was sunny and the air was warm. The heat was 30 degrees outside. My parents worked for railroad and on June 7, Mom and I went on the "memory" train from the station. Ufa to o.p. 1710 km. By that time, the wounded and the dead had already been taken out, a railway connection had already been established, but what I saw 2 hours after departure ... I will never forget! Several kilometers before the epicenter of the explosion, there was nothing. Everything is burnt! Where once there was a forest, grass, bushes, now everything was covered with ash. It's like napalm that burned everything out, leaving nothing in return. Mangled carriages were scattered everywhere, on the miraculously survived trees were fragments of mattresses and sheets. Fragments of human bodies were also scattered everywhere ... and this is a smell, it was hot outside and a cadaverous smell was everywhere. And tears, grief, grief, grief ...
The explosion of a large volume of gas distributed in space had the character of a volumetric explosion. The power of the explosion was estimated at 300 tons of TNT. According to other estimates, the power of a volumetric explosion could reach 10 kilotons of TNT, which is comparable to the power of a nuclear explosion in Hiroshima (12.5 kilotons). The force of the explosion was such that the shock wave knocked out glass in the city of Asha, located more than 10 km from the scene. The pillar of flame was visible for more than 100 km. Destroyed 350 meters of railways, 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines. The fire that broke out during the explosion covered an area of about 250 hectares.
The official version claims that the gas leak from the product pipeline became possible due to damage inflicted on it by an excavator bucket during its construction in October 1985, four years before the disaster. The leak started 40 minutes before the explosion.
According to another version, the cause of the accident was the corrosive effect on the outer part of the pipe of electric leakage currents, the so-called "stray currents" of the railway. A micro fistula was formed 2-3 weeks before the explosion, then, as a result of the cooling of the pipe, a crack spreading in length appeared in the place of gas expansion. Liquid condensate soaked the soil at the depth of the trench, without leaving the outside, and gradually descended down the slope to the railway.
When two trains met, probably as a result of braking, a spark arose, which caused the gas to detonate. But most likely the cause of the gas detonation was an accidental spark from under the pantograph of one of the locomotives.
Already 22 years have passed since the moment when this monstrous catastrophe near Ulu-Telyak happened. More than 600 people were killed. How many people were crippled? Many have remained unaccounted for. The real culprits of this disaster were never found. The trial lasted more than 6 years, only the “scapegoats” were punished. After all, this tragedy could have been avoided, if not the carelessness and negligence that we faced, then we. The drivers passed on that there is strong smell gas, but no action was taken. We must not forget about this tragedy, about the pain that people have endured ... Until now, every day we are notified about one or another sad incident. Where more than 600 lives were interrupted by chance. For their relatives and friends, this is a place on the land of Bashkortostan - the 1710th kilometer by rail ...
In addition, I quote extracts from Soviet newspapers that wrote about the disaster at that time:
From the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Council of Ministers of the USSR on June 3 at 11:14 pm Moscow time on the liquefied gas product pipeline, in the immediate vicinity of the Chelyabinsk-Ufa railway section, a gas leak occurred as a result of the accident. During the passage of two oncoming passenger trains with the destination Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk, an explosion of great force and fire occurred. There are numerous casualties.
At about 23 hours 10 minutes Moscow time, one of the drivers transmitted by radio: they entered a zone of strong gas pollution. After that, the connection was cut off ... As we now know, an explosion occurred after that. Its strength was such that on the central estate of the "Red Sunrise" collective farm, all the glass flew out. And this is a few kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion. We also saw a heavy wheelset, which found itself in an instant in the forest at a distance of more than five hundred meters from the railway. The rails were twisted into unthinkable loops. And then what to say about people. A lot of people died. Of some, only a heap of ash remained. It is difficult to write about this, but the train to Adler included two carriages with children traveling to the pioneer camp. Most of them burned down.
Disaster on the Transsib.
Here is what the Izvestia correspondent was told at the Ministry of Railways: The pipeline on which the catastrophe occurred passes about a kilometer from the Ufa-Chelyabinsk mainline (Kuibyshevskaya railway). At the time of the explosion and the resulting fire, passenger trains 211 (Novosibirsk-Adler) and 212 (Adler-Novosibirsk) were going towards each other. The impact of the blast wave and flame threw fourteen cars off the track, destroyed the contact network, damaged communication lines and the railway track for several hundred meters. The fire spread to the trains, and in a few hours the fire was extinguished. According to preliminary data, the explosion occurred due to a rupture of the Western Siberia - Ural pipeline near the Asha railway station. It is used to distill raw materials for Kuibyshev's chemical plants. Chelyabinsk. Bashkiria ... Its length is 1860 kilometers. According to experts who are now working at the site of the accident, there was a leak of liquefied propane-butane gas in this area. Here the product pipeline goes through mountainous terrain. For a certain time, the gas accumulated in two deep hollows and exploded for unknown reasons. The front of the soaring flame was about one and a half to two kilometers. It was possible to extinguish the fire directly on the product pipeline only after all the hydrocarbon collected at the site of the rupture had burned out. It turned out that long before the explosion, residents of nearby settlements felt a strong smell of gas in the air. It spread over a distance of about 4 to 8 kilometers. Such messages came from the population around 21 o'clock local time, and the tragedy, as you know, happened later. However, instead of searching for and eliminating the leak, someone (while the investigation is underway) added pressure to the pipeline and the gas continued to flow through the hollows.
Explosion on a summer night.
As a result of the leak, the gas gradually accumulated in the hollow, and its concentration increased. Experts believe that freight and passenger trains passing alternately were laying a “corridor” safe for themselves with a powerful flow of air, and the trouble was pushed back. According to this version, it would probably have moved this time as well, since the trains "Novosibirsk - Adler" and "Adler - Novosibirsk", according to the railway schedule, were not supposed to meet at this section. But by a tragic accident, on the train to Adler, one of the women began premature birth... The doctors who were among the passengers gave her first aid. At the nearest station, the train was delayed for 15 minutes to hand over the mother and child to an ambulance called. And when the fatal meeting took place in the gas-polluted area, the “corridor effect” did not work. To ignite the explosive mixture, a tiny spark from under the wheels, thrown out into the window of a smoldering cigarette, a lighted match, was enough.
The government commission held a meeting of the government commission on June 6 in Ufa, headed by Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR G.G. Vedernikov. Minister of Health of the RSFSR A.I. Potapov reported to the Commission on urgent action to provide assistance to victims of the disaster on the railroad. He said that at 7 o'clock in the morning on June 6, 503 people from among the wounded, including 115 children, were in medical institutions in Ufa, 299 people are in serious condition. In the medical institutions of Chelyabinsk - 149 victims, including 40 children in serious condition, 299 people are. As it was reported at the meeting, according to preliminary data, about 1200 people were on both trains at the time of the crash. It is still difficult to give a more precise figure, due to the fact that the number of children under the age of five traveling on trains, on which, according to the current regulation, no train tickets were purchased, and possible passengers who also did not purchase tickets, are not known.
Until the moment of the disaster, trains # 211 and # 212 had never met at this point. The delay of train No. 212 for technical reasons and the stopping of train No. 211 at the intermediate station for disembarkation of the woman who was in labor, led the two passenger trains to the fatal place at the same time.
This is what a cold news bulletin sounds like.
The weather was calm. The gas flowing from the top filled the entire lowland. The driver of the freight train, who had traveled the 1710th kilometer shortly before the explosion, reported by communication that there was a strong gas pollution in this place. They promised him to figure it out ...
On the stretch Asha - Ulu-Telyak near the Snake Hill, the ambulances almost missed each other, but there was a terrible explosion, followed by another. Flame filled everything around. The very air became a flame. By inertia, the trains rolled out of the intense burning zone. The tail cars of both trains were unsettled. The roof of the trailed "zero" car was blown off by the blast wave, and those who were lying on the upper shelves were thrown onto the embankment.
The clock found in the ashes showed 1.10 local time.
A giant flash was seen tens of kilometers away
Until now, the mystery of this terrible catastrophe worries astrologers, scientists and experts. How did it happen that two late twin trains Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk met in a dangerous place, where the product pipeline was leaking? Why was there a spark? Why did the trains, which were most crowded with people in the summer, get into the heat, and not, for example, freight trains? And why did the gas explode a kilometer from the leak? Until now, the number of those killed is not known for certain - in the carriages in Soviet times, when the names were not put on the tickets, there could be a huge number of "birds with one stone" traveling to the blessed south and returning back.
Flame shot up into the sky, it became light like day, we thought we dropped an atomic bomb, - says the Iglinsky police department, resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod Anatoly Bezrukov. - We rushed to the conflagration in cars, on tractors. The equipment could not climb a steep slope. They began to climb the slope - all around the pine trees stand like burnt matches. Below they saw torn metal, fallen poles, power transmission masts, pieces of bodies ... One woman was hanging on a birch tree with her belly ripped open. An old man was crawling along the slope from the fiery mash, coughing. How many years have passed, and he still stands before my eyes. Then I saw that the man was burning like gas with a blue flame.
At one o'clock in the morning, teenagers returning from a disco in the village of Kazayak arrived to help the villagers. The children themselves, among the sizzling metal, helped along with the adults.
We tried to carry the children first, ”says Ramil Khabibullin, a resident of the Kazayak village. - Adults were simply dragged away from the fire. And they moan, cry, ask to be covered with something. And what will you cover? They took off their clothes.
The wounded crawled in a state of shock in the windbreak, looking for them by moans and cries.
They took a man by the hands, by the legs, but his skin remained in his hands ... - said the driver of the "Ural" Viktor Titlin, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - All night, until the morning, they took the victims to the hospital in Asha.
The driver on the state farm bus, Marat Sharifullin, made three trips, and then began to shout: "I will not go anymore, I bring only corpses!" On the way, the children screamed, asked for a drink, the burnt skin stuck to the seats, many did not worry about the road.
Cars did not climb the hill, they had to carry the wounded on themselves, - says a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod, Marat Yusupov. - Carried on shirts, blankets, seat covers. I remember one guy from the village of Maisky, he, a healthy one, took out about thirty people. Covered in blood, but did not stop.
Three flights on an electric locomotive with wounded people were made by Sergei Stolyarov. At the Ulu-Telyak station, he, a machinist with two months of experience, missed the 212nd ambulance and followed him on a freight train. After a few kilometers I saw a huge flame. Having uncoupled the oil tanks, he began to slowly drive up to the overturned cars. Catenary wires torn off by the blast wave were snaking on the embankment. Taking the burnt people into the cabin, Stolyarov moved to the siding, returned to the crash site with a platform attached. He picked up children, women, who had become helpless men, and loaded, loaded ... I returned home - my shirt was staked from caked foreign blood.
All the village equipment came, they were driven by tractors, ”recalled the chairman of the Krasny Voskhod collective farm, Sergei Kosmakov. - The wounded were sent to a rural boarding school, where their children were bandaged ...
Specialized help came much later - an hour and a half to two hours later.
At 1.45 am, the remote control received a call that a carriage was on fire under Ulu-Telyak, - says Mikhail Kalinin, senior doctor of the ambulance shift in the city of Ufa. - Ten minutes later, they clarified: the entire composition burned out. All the ambulances on duty were removed from the line and equipped with gas masks. Nobody knew where to go, Ulu-Telyak is 90 km from Ufa. Cars went just to the torch ...
We got out of the car on the ashes, the first thing we see is a doll and a severed leg ... - said the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev. - How many anesthetic injections I had to do is beyond my comprehension. When we set off with the wounded children, a woman ran up to me with a girl in her arms: “Doctor, take it. The baby's mother and father both died. " There were no seats in the car, I sat the girl on my lap. She was wrapped up to her chin in a sheet, her head was all burned, her hair curled into caked rings - like a lamb's, and she smelled like a fried lamb ... I still can't forget this little girl. On the way, she told me that her name was Jeanne, and that she was three years old. My daughter was the same age then. Now Zhanna should be 21 already, quite a bride ...
We found Zhanna, who was taken out of the affected area by the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev. In the book of memory. Akhmadeeva Zhanna Floridovna, born in 1986, was not destined to become a bride. At the age of three, she died in the Children's Republican Hospital of Ufa.
Trees fell like in a vacuum
At the scene of the tragedy, there was a sharp smell of cadaveric smell. The carriages, somehow rusty in color, lay a few meters from the tracks, intricately flattened and curved. It’s even hard to imagine what temperature could make the iron wriggle like that. It is surprising that in this fire, on the ground that turned into coke, where the electric supports and sleepers were torn out by the roots, people could still remain alive!
The military then determined: the power of the explosion was 20 megatons, which corresponds to half of the atomic bomb that the Americans dropped on Hiroshima, ”said Sergei Kosmakov, chairman of the Krasny Voskhod village council. - We ran to the place of the explosion - the trees fell, as if in a vacuum, - to the center of the explosion. The shock wave was so strong that windows were broken in all houses within a radius of 12 kilometers. We found pieces from the cars at a distance of six kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion.
Patients were brought in on dump trucks, on trucks side by side: alive, unconscious, already dead ... - recalls the intensive care physician Vladislav Zagrebenko. - Loaded in the dark. Sorted according to the principle of military medicine. Seriously injured - with one hundred percent burns - on the grass. There is no time for anesthesia, this is a law: if you help one, you will lose twenty. When we walked through the floors in the hospital, it felt like we were at war. In the wards, in the corridors, in the hall, there were black people with severe burns. I have never seen this, although I worked in intensive care.
In Chelyabinsk, the ill-fated train was boarded by the guys from School 107, who were going to Moldova to work in a labor camp in the vineyards.
Interestingly, the head teacher of the school, Tatyana Viktorovna Filatova, even before leaving, ran to the head of the station to convince that, due to safety measures, the carriage with the children should be placed at the beginning of the train. Not convinced ... Their "zero" carriage was hitched to the very end.
In the morning we learned that only one platform remained from our trailer car, - says Irina Konstantinova, director of the 107th school in Chelyabinsk. - Out of 54 people survived 9. Head teacher - Tatyana Viktorovna was lying on the bottom shelf with her 5-year-old son. So they died together. We didn’t find our military instructor Yuri Gerasimovich Tulupov, nor the children’s favorite teacher, Irina Mikhailovna Strelnikova. One high school student was identified only by his watch, another by a net in which his parents put food for him on the road.
My heart ached when the train arrived with the relatives of the victims, - said Anatoly Bezrukov. - They peered with hope at the cars, crumpled like pieces of paper. Elderly women crawled with plastic bags in their hands, hoping to find at least something left of their relatives.
After the wounded were taken away with charred and mangled pieces of bodies - arms, legs, shoulders, they were collected throughout the forest, removed from the trees and put on a stretcher. By the evening, when the refrigerators approached, there were about 20 of such stretchers filled with human remains. But in the evening the civil defense soldiers continued to use cutters to remove the remnants of flesh melted into the iron from the carriages. The things found in the area were put in a separate heap - children's toys and books, bags and suitcases, blouses and trousers, for some reason safe and sound, not even singed.
Salavat Abdulin, the father of the deceased high school student Irina, found her hair clip, which he had repaired before the trip, her shirt, in the ashes.
There was no daughter on the lists of the living, - he will recall later. “We were looking for her in hospitals for three days. No trace. And then my wife and I went to the refrigerator ... There was one girl there. She is similar in age to our daughter. The head was gone. Black as a frying pan. I thought I would recognize by her legs, she was dancing with me, there was a ballerina, but there were no legs either ...
Two mothers claimed for one child at once
And in Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Samara, places in hospitals were urgently vacated. A helicopter school was used to take the wounded out of the Ashi and Iglino hospitals to Ufa. Cars landed in the center of the city in the Gafuri park behind the circus - this place in Ufa is still called the “helipad”. Cars took off every three minutes. By 11 am, all the victims were taken to city hospitals.
- The first patient was admitted to us at 6 hours 58 minutes, - said the head of the burn center of the city of Ufa, Radik Medikhatovich Zinatullin. - From eight in the morning until lunchtime - there was a massive flow of victims. The burns were deep, almost all of them had burns of the upper respiratory tract. More than 70% of the body was burned in half of the victims. Our center had just opened, and there were enough antibiotics, blood preparations, and a fibrin film, which is applied to the burned surface. By lunchtime, teams of doctors from Leningrad and Moscow arrived.
There were many children among the victims. I remember that one boy had two mothers, each of whom was sure that her son was on the bed ...
American doctors, as they learned, flew in from the States, after making a round, said: "No more than 40 percent will survive." As in a nuclear explosion, when the main injury is precisely the burn. We pulled out half of those whom they considered doomed. I remember a paratrooper from Chebarkul - Edik Ashirov, a jeweler by profession. The Americans said that he should be transferred to drugs and that's it. Like, it's still not a tenant. And we saved him! He was one of the last to be discharged, in September.
An unbearable atmosphere reigned in the headquarters these days. Women clung to the slightest hope and did not leave the lists for a long time, fainting in the same place.
The father and the young girl who arrived from Dnepropetrovsk on the second day after the tragedy, unlike other relatives, shone with happiness. They came to their son and husband, in a young family - two kids.
We do not need lists, - they brush it off. “We know he survived. In "Pravda" they wrote on the first page, he saved children. We know what lies in the 21st hospital.
Indeed, the young officer Andrei Dontsov, who was returning home, became famous when he pulled children out of the burning carriages. But the publication indicated that the hero had 98% of burns.
The wife and father are shifting from foot to foot, they want to quickly leave the mournful headquarters, where people are crying.
Take it, in the morgue, - says the phone number of the 21st hospital.
Nadya Shugaeva, a milkmaid from the Novosibirsk region, suddenly starts laughing hysterically.
Found, found!
The attendants are trying to smile forcedly. I found my father and brother, sister and young nephew. Found ... in the lists of the dead.
The switchmen answered for the disaster.
When the wind still carried the ashes of those who had been burnt alive, the most powerful equipment was driven to the crash site. Fearing an epidemic due to unburied body fragments smeared on the ground and beginning to decompose, they hastened to raze the burnt lowland of 200 hectares.
The builders were responsible for the death of people, for the terrible burns and injuries of more than a thousand people.
From the very beginning, the investigation reached out to very important persons: to the heads of the branch design institute, who approved the project with violations. An indictment was also brought against the Deputy Minister of the Oil Industry Dongaryan, who by his instructions, due to cost savings, canceled telemetry - devices that control the operation of the entire highway. There was a helicopter that flew around the entire route, it was canceled, there was a lineman - and the lineman was removed.
On December 26, 1992, the trial took place. It turned out that the gas leak from the overpass was due to a crack inflicted on it four years before the disaster, in October 1985, by an excavator bucket during construction work. The product pipeline was filled with mechanical damage. The case was sent for further investigation.
Six years later Supreme Court Bashkiria passed a sentence - all the defendants were sentenced to two years in a colony-settlement. The head of the site, the foreman, foremen, and builders were in the dock. “Switchmen”.
Afghans worked in the morgue.
The hardest work was undertaken by the soldiers-internationalists. Afghans volunteered to help the special services where even experienced doctors could not stand it. The corpses of the dead did not fit in the Ufa morgue on Tsvetochnaya, and human remains were stored in refrigerated vehicles. Considering that the outside was extremely hot, the smell around the makeshift glaciers was unbearable, and flies flew from all over the area. This work required endurance and endurance from the volunteers. physical strength, all the dead who arrived were required to be placed on hastily put together shelves, to hang tags, to sort. Many could not stand it, shuddering in vomiting convulsions.
Relatives, distraught with grief, looking for their children, did not notice anything around, gazing intently at the charred fragments of bodies. Moms and dads, grandparents, aunts and uncles, had wild dialogues:
Isn't that our Helen? they said, crowding around a black piece of meat.
No, our Helen had folds on the handles ...
How the parents managed to identify their own body remained a mystery to those around them.
In order not to injure relatives and protect them from visiting the morgue, terrible photo albums were brought to the headquarters, posting on the pages pictures from different angles of fragments of unidentified bodies. There were pages in this horrible collection of deaths with the stamp - "identified." However, many still went to the refrigerated trucks, hoping that the photographs were lying. And on the guys who had recently come from a real war, suffering fell over them, which they did not see, fighting with the dushmans. Often the guys were the first medical assistance those who fainted and found themselves on the verge of insanity from grief, or with impassive faces were helped to turn their relatives over the charred bodies.
The dead cannot be revived, despair came when the living began to arrive, - the Afghans later said, talking about the most difficult experiences.
The lucky ones were on their own
There were also curious cases.
In the morning, a man came to the village council from a Novosibirsk train, with a briefcase, in a suit, in a tie - not a single scratch, - said the district police officer Anatoly Bezrukov. - And how he got out of the flared train - he does not remember. The night in the woods lost consciousness.
Those who lagged behind the train and to the headquarters also appeared.
Looking for me? - asked the guy who looked into the mournful place at the railway station.
Why should we look for you? - were surprised there, but memorizedly glanced at the lists.
There is! - the young man rejoiced, finding his name in the column of the missing.
Alexander Kuznetsov went on a spree a few hours before the tragedy. He went out to drink beer, and how the ill-fated train left does not remember. Spent a day at the station, and only having sobered, I learned about what had happened. I got to Ufa to report that I was alive. At this time, the young man's mother methodically bypassed the morgue, dreaming of finding at least something from her son to bury. Mother and son left home together.
Subordination refused at the site of the explosion
The soldiers who worked on the tracks were given 100 grams of alcohol each. It's hard to imagine how much metal and burnt human flesh they had to shovel. 11 cars were thrown out of the way, 7 of them completely burned down. People worked fiercely, not paying attention to the heat, the stench and the almost physical horror of death hovering in this sticky syrup.
Are you, oh ... eating? - shouts a young soldier with autogenes to an elderly man in uniform.
Colonel General GO gently lifts his leg off the human jaw.
Sorry, - he mutters in confusion and hides in the headquarters, which is in the nearest tent.
In this episode, all the conflicting emotions experienced by those present: anger at human weakness in front of the elements, and embarrassment - a quiet joy that they are not collecting their remains and horror, mixed with dullness - when there is a lot of death - it no longer causes violent despair.
At the site of the tragedy, the railroad workers found huge amounts of money and valuable things. All of them were handed over to the state, including a savings account for 10 thousand rubles. And two days later it turned out that an Ashinskiy teenager had been arrested for looting. The three managed to escape. While the rest were saving the living, they tore gold jewelry from the dead along with burnt fingers and ears. If the bastard had not been shut down under serious protection in Iglino, indignant local residents would have torn him to shreds. Young cops made a helpless gesture:
They would have known that the criminal would have to be defended ...
Chelyabinsk has lost hockey hope.
The 107th school of Chelyabinsk lost 45 people near Ufa, the Traktor sports club lost a youth team of hockey players, two-time champions of the country.
Only goalkeeper Borya Tortunov was forced to stay at home: my grandmother broke her arm.
Out of ten hockey players - champions of the Union among national teams of regions - only one survived, Alexander Sychev, who later played for the Mechel club. The pride of the team - forward Artyom Masalov, defenders Seryozha Genergard, Andrey Kulazhenkin, goalkeeper Oleg Devyatov were not found at all. The youngest of the hockey team, Andriy Shevchenko, lived the longest of all the burnt guys, five days. On June 15, he would celebrate his sixteenth birthday.
- My husband and I managed to see him, - says Andrei's mother Natalya Antonovna. - They found him according to the lists in the intensive care unit of the 21st hospital in Ufa. “He was lying like a mummy, all in bandages, his face was gray-brown, his neck was all swollen. On the plane, when we were taking him to Moscow, he kept asking: "Where are the guys?" In the 13th hospital - a branch of the Institute. Vishnevsky, we wanted to christen him, but did not have time. Through the catheter, the doctors injected him three times with holy water ... He left us on the day of the Ascension of the Lord - he died quietly, unconscious.
A year after the tragedy, the Traktor club organized a tournament dedicated to the memory of the fallen hockey players, which has become a tradition. The goalkeeper of the deceased Traktor-73 team, Boris Tortunov, who then stayed at home because of his grandmother, became a two-time champion of the country and the European Cup. On his initiative, the pupils of the Traktor school collected money for prizes for the tournament participants, which are traditionally given to the mothers and fathers of the deceased children.
The explosion destroyed 37 cars and two electric locomotives, of which 7 cars were completely burned down, 26 were burned out from the inside, 11 cars were torn off and thrown off the tracks by the shock wave. According to official data, 258 corpses were found at the scene of the accident, 806 people received burns and injuries of varying severity, of which 317 died in hospitals. In total, 575 people died, 623 were injured.
