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Fire at Russia Nursing Home Kills 62

Posted on: Tuesday, 20 March 2007, 09:00 CDT

By SERGEI VENYAVSKY

KAMYSHEVATSKAYA, Russia - Fire swept through a nursing home in southern Russia after the night watchman ignored two alarms Tuesday, killing 62 people in a town where the closest fire station was nearly an hour's drive away, officials said.

Too feeble to escape on their own, some of the elderly knocked on the windows seeking aid, according to a local man who said he helped evacuate people from the two-story brick building in the Azov Sea coast village of Kamyshevatskaya.

"I rushed here, saw the flames and started to help people get out from the second floor," Yevgeny Solomin told NTV.

"But what could we do?" he said. "Do you know how hard it is to get someone down a ladder from the second floor? If only firefighters had been here."

The firehouse in Kamyshevatskaya closed last year, and the firefighters had to come from a town about 30 miles away, emergency officials said.

Russian television networks showed footage of the building's blacked exterior walls, charred wheelchairs and a first-floor room that was gutted and covered in ash.

Besides the dead, 35 were injured, regional emergency official Sergei Petrov said, adding that 97 people were in the building when the fire broke out, including four employees. Acting Krasnodar regional governor Murat Akhedzhak said 30 people were hospitalized and that their lives were not in danger.

The fire happened less than 24 hours after a methane gas explosion at a Siberian coal mine killed more than 100 people in Russia's deadliest mining disaster in a decade.

Deadly fires at schools, dormitories, hospitals and other state-run facilities have plagued Russia in recent years, underlining rampant violations of fire safety rules and official negligence.

A fire at a Moscow drug treatment facility in December killed 45 women trapped by gates and barred windows, and a blaze a day later killed nine patients at a Siberian clinic for mentally ill people.

In a telegram to the Krasnodar governor, President Vladimir Putin said "it is painful that elderly, defenseless people died in the flames" and called for a detailed review of fire safety systems in the region, according to the Kremlin.

Firefighters were alerted to the blaze shortly after 1 a.m. and headed for the scene from Yeisk, a town on the other side of a peninsula, arriving nearly an hour later and extinguishing the fire by about 5 a.m., Petrov said.

A fire alarm system that had not been fully installed signaled three times, but a watchman - at the facility but outside the building - ignored the first two alarms and reported the fire only after he saw flames, Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Veronika Smolskaya said.

In addition, nursing home personnel were absent from their posts when the fire broke out, slowing efforts to find keys and open an emergency exit, she said. Three orderlies and a nurse were in the building, but they were not enough to quickly evacuate the elderly residents, Smolskaya said. NTV television reported that the nurse was among the dead.

The Russian Prosecutor General's Office said that renovation work had been carried out in the building and that interior wall panels released toxic gases when they burned, filling the second story with smoke. The ITAR-Tass news agency, citing emergency officials, reported that most of the victims died from smoke inhalation.

"There was no panic," Solomin said on state-run Channel One television, but added that some residents knocked on the windows, which had to be smashed with axes.

Authorities were considering carelessness, a short circuit and arson as possible causes of the fire, said Sergei Kudinov, the head of the Emergency Situations Ministry's southern branch. Petrov said a faulty electrical wire may have been the cause.

Putin ordered thorough investigations of the fire, the mine explosion and the crash-landing of a passenger jet that killed six people Saturday.

Russia records nearly 18,000 fire deaths a year, several times the per capita rate in the United States and other Western countries. Last year, an average of just under 600 fires were recorded daily, according to authorities, killing 17,065 people in the nation of 142 million - down nearly 7 percent from 2005 but still working out to almost 50 fire deaths every day.

Emergency official Sergei Salov said on Channel One that an inspection of the nursing home in Kamyshevatskaya in early 2006 uncovered 36 fire safety violations, and that 30 of them had been corrected before a subsequent check. He did not detail the violations, but Channel One said the facility did not have enough fire extinguishers and gas masks.

The fire station in Kamyshevatskaya was closed late last year, state-run television channels reported, even though the village has a school and two kindergartens as well as the nursing home.

"The fire station was closed and has been plundered," local resident Pavel Babenko told Channel One. "Nobody cares about anything."

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This story corrects the number of fire deaths in 2006 to 17,065 instead of 17,650.

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

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