UFA, June 4 - RIA Novosti, Ramilya Salikhova. It was the ambulance doctors who had the main job of rescuing the passengers of the Adler-Novosibirsk and Novosibirsk-Adler trains who were caught in a fire trap in the lowlands near Ufa on the night of June 4, 1989, where a gas pipeline exploded. There were no rescuers from the Ministry of Emergency Situations in Russia at that time, and there was no state with that name either.
Fatal coincidence
The tragedy occurred on the 1710th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the Iglinsky district of Bashkiria on the stretch between the stations Asha (Chelyabinsk region) and Uglu-Telyak (Bashkiria). By the time the trains arrived, a huge cloud of gas had accumulated here, which leaked from a damaged gas pipeline." Western Siberia- Ural - Volga region", located 900 meters from railway. The terrain turned out to be such that the liquid gas that came out of the pipe, evaporating and accumulating at the surface of the earth, “stacked” precisely towards the railway track - into the lowland.
The explosion occurred at the moment when two trains, which had never met at this point before, entered the gas cloud at once.
The explosion occurred at 01.15 Bashkir time (23.15 Moscow time) and, according to experts, the explosion was only seven times weaker than the explosion of the American atomic bomb in Hiroshima in 1945.
The front of the rising flame was about 1.5-2 kilometers, the fire covered 250 hectares. According to rescuers, from a helicopter the crash site looked like a scorched circle with a diameter of about a kilometer. According to experts, a short-term rise in temperature in the area of the explosion exceeded 1 thousand degrees Celsius.
The explosion destroyed 37 cars and both electric locomotives, seven cars burned completely, 26 burned out from the inside, 11 were torn from the train and thrown off the tracks by the blast wave.
According to documents, both trains carried 1,284 passengers, including 383 children, and 86 members of train and locomotive crews. There were apparently more passengers, as the trains were crowded with holidaymakers. In addition, among the passengers there were children under 5 years old, for whom tickets were not issued. In cases where the entire family died, it was not possible to find out the exact number of dead family members.
According to official data, 258 dead were found at the scene of the accident, 806 people received burns and injuries of varying severity, of which 317 died in hospitals - as a result, the number of victims of the tragedy increased to 575. However, 675 names are engraved on the memorial at the site of the disaster, and according to According to unofficial data, about 780 people died.
Doctors' response saved hundreds of lives
The senior ambulance doctor in Ufa, 57-year-old Mikhail Kalinin, who is still working in this position, claims that he does not like to remember the events of those days, but made an exception for RIA Novosti.
Mikhail Kalinin remembers that the first call about this tragedy came at 01.45 from the dispatcher at the Ulu-Telyak station, 100 kilometers from Ufa. He reported that the train carriage was on fire.
“I immediately made an additional call to the dispatcher at the railway station of the city of Ufa, eight minutes later I sent 53 ambulance teams to the torch. Because there was no exact address of the scene of the incident. And I sent them one by one, and not all together. This was done so that doctors could keep in touch with each other and with me,” says Kalinin.
The radios at that time were weak, it was difficult to contact the doctors who went to the scene. It was especially difficult for the doctors who were the first to arrive at the scene of the disaster.
“The first to arrive were Yuri Furtsev, orderly Cherny and cardiologist Valery Sayfutdinov,” recalls the senior ambulance doctor.
Resuscitator Furtsev, who still works in the ambulance, remembers what he saw first at the scene of the disaster. “There was no road, and the rescuers made their way to the epicenter of the explosion on foot. And when they arrived, they saw torn cars, burnt forest and burned people,” he recalls.
Eyewitnesses told terrible things: when the explosion occurred, people burned like matches.
“It’s very difficult to remember this, I don’t know how, but then we apparently worked on automatic, immediately organized the delivery of people to the regional hospital. The first three ambulance teams from Ufa were like reconnaissance vehicles, a hundred ambulances immediately left for us help," says Furtsev.
According to him, if it were not for the immediate reaction of doctors and local residents, there would have been many more victims.
Everything was missing
Senior ambulance doctor Mikhail Kalinin recalls how there was a shortage of literally everything: people, cars, medicines.
“It was difficult to find people that night. It happened on the night from Saturday to Sunday, many were at their dachas,” says Kalinin.
All ambulance teams in the city were involved. Only seven cars were left for city calls. “On the night from 3 to 4, we refused 456 calls to the ambulance, we only responded to traffic accidents,” he recalls.
Kalinin notes that the doctors that night used their forces and means very rationally. This is what helped them cope with the difficult task of transporting the victims.
“Together with the Minister of Health Alfred Turyanov, we decided to involve a helicopter school for the fastest transportation of victims from the source of the accident. In order to deliver people as quickly as possible to hospitals, I proposed using the landing site for helicopters of the military school with the victims almost in the center of the city, behind Hotel "Arena". This place was not chosen by chance. It was from the square behind the hotel to all the hospitals where we took people. shortcut to everyone medical institutions, to one hospital forty seconds, to the second - one and a half minutes, and to the third - two and a half minutes drive. Thanks to the traffic police service, who helped organize unimpeded passage for ambulances and blocked the city highway for access to this organized helipad. Additional transport was brought in - taxis and buses," says Kalinin.
According to him, the medicines ran out almost immediately after receiving the first patients. “What saved us then was that it was summer and people were not freezing. workplace Deputy chief doctor of the ambulance Ramil Zainullin opened warehouses with strong drugs, and all victims received painkillers almost at the scene. It helped that they were in warehouses civil defense there was a sufficient number of stretchers and dressings," Kalinin said.
Doctor's alarm
“On the morning of June 4, the head of the health department of the city of Ufa, Dimi Chanyshev, addressed the city’s medical community on the radio with a request to go to work. It was Sunday, and only doctors and orderlies on duty remained in the hospitals,” recalls Kalinin.
According to him, everyone who could came out, even clinics. Each victim required the help of not one, but several specialists. Three days later it was decided to send certain number people to burn hospitals in other cities. Organized the flight of planes from Ufa to Moscow, Gorky ( Nizhny Novgorod), Samara, Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg), Leningrad. The injured were accompanied by ambulance doctors on the road, even if they were already working outside of their shift.
Everyone was brought in alive. “Thanks to all the doctors. No one had to repeat requests and orders twice that night, everyone understood each other perfectly, everyone was overwhelmed by the thought - to save people, every person,” the doctor recalls with excitement.
“I was 37 years old then. I went to work with fair hair and returned gray. Overnight, not only my head turned white. After the tragedy, we couldn’t talk about this catastrophe for some time, it was so scary. God forbid we see such human tragedy," he said.
And then what?
All participants in the rescue operation and ambulance doctors were awarded the Order of Friendship of Peoples. 18 ambulance workers received the title "Excellent Health Worker of the USSR."
After the tragedy near Ufa, passenger cars began to be made from other, less flammable and more heat- and fire-resistant materials.
And in Ufa, in the 18th city hospital, there is a “department of medical disasters”. On it, as in others medical universities In Russia, future doctors are being taught a life-saving course using the “Kalinin method.” The course was based on his reaction to the tragedy - that he, without consulting anyone, decided to send a hundred ambulance crews to the scene of the tragedy.
Original taken from schnause at the age of 25. June 4, 1989. Disaster in Chelyabinsk.
June 4, 2014 marks 25 years since a railway transport disaster of a monstrous scale and casualties occurred. The disaster on the Asha - Ulu Telyak stretch is the largest disaster in the history of Russia and the USSR, which occurred on June 4, 1989, 11 km from the city of Asha. As two passenger trains passed, there was a powerful explosion of an unlimited cloud of fuel-air mixture formed as a result of an accident on the nearby Siberia-Ural-Volga region pipeline. 575 people were killed (according to other sources 645), more than 600 were injured.
The disaster is considered the largest in the history of the USSR and Russia.
Trains No. 211 Novosibirsk-Adler (20 cars) and No. 212 Adler-Novosibirsk (18 cars) carried 1,284 passengers, including 383 children and 86 people from train and locomotive crews.
The train from Novosibirsk that night was late due to technical reasons, and the oncoming train stopped at an intermediate station shortly before the tragedy for an urgent disembarkation - a woman went into labor right in the carriage.
Significant passengers traveling to Adler were already looking forward to a quiet holiday at sea. Those who, on the contrary, were already returning from vacation, were driving towards them. The explosion, which occurred in the middle of the night, is estimated by experts as equivalent to 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 cars and two electric locomotives. 11 cars were thrown off the tracks by the shock wave, 7 of them were completely burned. The remaining 26 cars were burned on the outside and burned out inside. In a radius of three kilometers around the epicenter, centuries-old trees were felled.
350 meters of railway tracks and 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines were destroyed. The fire caused by the explosion engulfed an area of about 250 hectares. Later, the investigation will find out that the root cause of the gas leak and explosion was poor-quality welding of the gas pipeline. The result is 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 formed and the trains entered a completely gas-contaminated area, where a small spark was enough for a powerful explosion.
During operation 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.
Memoirs of an eyewitness.
June 4, 1989. It was very hot these days. The weather was sunny and the air was warm. It was 30 degrees outside. My parents worked on the railroad, and on June 7, Mom and I went on the “memory” train from the station. Ufa to op. 1710 km. By that time, the wounded and dead had already been taken out, the railway connection had already been established, but what I saw 2 hours after departure... I will never forget! There was nothing a few kilometers before the epicenter of the explosion. Everything was burned! Where once there was forest, grass, bushes, now everything was covered with ash. It's like napalm, which burned out everything, leaving nothing in return. Mangled carriages lay everywhere, and there were fragments of mattresses and sheets on the miraculously surviving trees. There were also fragments of human bodies scattered everywhere... and that was the smell, it was hot outside and the smell of corpses 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 trinitrotoluene. According to other estimates, the power of the volumetric explosion could reach up to 10 kilotons of TNT, which is comparable to the power of the nuclear explosion in Hiroshima (12.5 kilotons). The force of the explosion was such that the shock wave broke windows in the city of Asha, located more than 10 km from the scene of the incident. The column of flame was visible more than 100 km away. 350 meters of railway tracks and 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines were destroyed. The fire caused by the explosion engulfed an area of about 250 hectares.
The official version states that the gas leak from the product pipeline was possible due to damage caused to it by an excavator bucket during its construction in October 1985, four years before the disaster. The leak began 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. 2-3 weeks before the explosion, a micro fistula formed, then, as a result of cooling of the pipe, a crack that grew in length appeared at the point of gas expansion. Liquid condensate soaked the soil at the depth of the trench, without coming out, and gradually went down the slope to the railway.
When the two trains met, probably as a result of braking, a spark occurred, which caused the gas to detonate. But most likely the cause of gas detonation was an accidental spark from under the pantograph of one of the locomotives.
22 years have already passed since this monstrous disaster occurred near Ulu-Telyak. More than 600 people died. How many people were left crippled? Many remained missing. The real culprits of this disaster were never found. The trial lasted more than 6 years, only the “switchmen” were punished. After all, this tragedy could have been avoided, if not for the carelessness and negligence that we encountered then. The drivers reported that there was a strong smell of gas, but no action was taken. We must not forget about this tragedy, the pain that people experienced... Until now, every day we are notified of one or another sad incident. Where, by chance, more than 600 lives were interrupted. For their family and friends, this place is on the land of Bashkortostan - the 1710th kilometer along the railway...
In addition, I provide excerpts 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 23:14 Moscow time, a gas leak occurred as a result of an accident on a liquefied gas product pipeline, in the immediate vicinity of the Chelyabinsk-Ufa section of the railway. During the passage of two oncoming passenger trains with destinations Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk, a large explosion and fire occurred. There are numerous casualties.
At approximately 23:10 Moscow time, one of the drivers radioed: they had entered a zone of heavy gas pollution. After that, the connection was lost... As we now know, after that there was an explosion. Its strength was such that all the glass on the central estate of the Red Sunrise collective farm flew out. And this is several kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion. We also saw a heavy pair of wheels, which in an instant found itself in the forest at a distance of more than five hundred meters from the railway. The rails were twisted into unimaginable loops. What then can we say about people? A lot of people died. From some, only a pile of ashes remained. It’s hard to write about this, but the train heading to Adler included two carriages with children traveling in pioneer camp. Most of them burned down.
Disaster on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Here's what the Izvestia correspondent was told at the Ministry of Railways: The pipeline on which the disaster occurred runs about a kilometer from the Ufa-Chelyabinsk highway (Kuibyshev railway). At the moment of the explosion and the resulting fire, passenger trains 211 (Novosibirsk-Adler) and 212 (Adler - Novosibirsk) were moving 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 the fire was extinguished within a few hours. According to preliminary data, the explosion occurred due to a rupture in the Western Siberia - Ural pipeline near railway station Asha. Raw materials for Kuibyshev chemical plants are distilled through it. Chelyabinsk. Bashkiria... Its length is 1860 kilometers. According to experts who are now working at the scene of the accident, there was a leak of liquefied propane-butane gas in this area. Here the product pipeline runs through mountainous terrain. Over a period of time, gas accumulated in two deep hollows and, for reasons still unknown, exploded. The front of the rising flame was approximately one and a half to two kilometers. It was possible to extinguish the fire directly on the product pipeline only after all the hydrocarbon that had accumulated at the rupture site 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 approximately 4 to 8 kilometers. Such messages came from the population around 21:00 local time, and the tragedy, as is known, occurred later. However, instead of searching for and eliminating the leak, someone (while the investigation is ongoing) added pressure to the pipeline and the gas continued to spread through the hollows.
Explosion on a summer night.
As a result of the leak, gas gradually accumulated in the ravine, its concentration increasing. Experts believe that the freight and passenger trains passing alternately with a powerful air flow paved a safe “corridor” for themselves, and the trouble was pushed aside. According to this version, it might have been pushed back this time, since the Novosibirsk - Adler and Adler - Novosibirsk trains, according to the railway schedule, were not supposed to meet on this section. But on tragic accident On the train en route to Adler, one of the women went into premature labor. The doctors who were among the passengers provided her with first aid. At the nearest station, the train was delayed for 15 minutes in order to hand over the mother and child to the called ambulance. And when the fatal meeting took place in a polluted area, the “corridor effect” did not work. A tiny spark from under the wheels, a smoldering cigarette thrown out the window, or a lit match was enough to ignite the explosive mixture.
On June 6 in Ufa, a meeting of the government commission was held, headed by Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR G.G. Vedernikov. The Minister of Health of the RSFSR A.I. Potapov reported to the commission on urgent measures to provide assistance to those injured as a result of the railway disaster. He reported that as of 7 a.m. on June 6, there were 503 wounded people in Ufa medical institutions, including 115 children, in serious condition There are 299 people. There are 149 victims in medical institutions in Chelyabinsk, including 40 children; 299 people are in serious condition. As was reported at the meeting, according to preliminary data, there were about 1,200 people on both trains at the time of the disaster. It is still difficult to give a more precise figure, due to the fact that the number of children under five years of age traveling on trains, for whom, according to the current regulations, train tickets were not purchased, and possible passengers who also did not purchase tickets, is unknown.
Until the time of the disaster, trains No. 211 and No. 212 had never met at this point. The delay of train No. 212 for technical reasons and the stop of train No. 211 at an intermediate station to disembark a woman who had gone into labor brought these two passenger trains to the fatal place at the same time.
This is what a cold news report sounds like.
The weather was calm. The gas flowing from above filled the entire lowland. The driver of a freight train, which had passed the 1710th kilometer shortly before the explosion, reported via communication that there was heavy gas pollution in this place. They promised to sort it out...
On the stretch Asha - Ulu-Telyak at Zmeinaya Gorka the ambulances almost missed each other, but there was a terrible explosion, followed by another. Everything around was filled with flames. The air itself became fire. By inertia, the trains rolled out of the intense burning zone. The tail cars of both trains were thrown off the track. The roof of the trailed “zero” car was torn 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 a product pipeline leaked? Why did the spark occur? Why did the trains, which were the most crowded with people in the summer, end up in the inferno, and not, for example, freight trains? And why did the gas explode a kilometer away from the leak? The number of deaths is still not known for certain - in the carriages in Soviet times, when they didn’t put names on the tickets, it could have been great amount“hares” traveling to the blessed south and returning back.
Flames shot up into the sky, it became as bright as day, we thought, they dropped an atomic bomb,” says Anatoly Bezrukov, a local police officer at the Iglinsky Department of Internal Affairs and a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. “We rushed to the fire in cars and tractors. The equipment could not climb the steep slope. They began to climb the slope - there were pine trees all around like burnt matches. Below we saw torn metal, fallen poles, power transmission masts, pieces of bodies... One woman was hanging on a birch tree with her stomach ripped open. An old man crawled along the slope from the fiery mess, 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 who were returning from a disco in the village of Kazayak arrived to help the villagers. The children themselves, amid the hissing metal, helped along with the adults.
They tried to carry the children out first,” says Ramil Khabibullin, a resident of the village of Kazayak. “The adults were simply dragged away from the fire. And they moan, cry, and ask to be covered with something. What will you cover it with? They took off their clothes.
The wounded, in a state of shock, crawled into the windfall and were searched for by moans and screams.
They took a man by the arms, legs, and his skin remained in his hands... said Ural driver 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 of the state farm bus, Marat Sharifullin, made three trips, and then began shouting: “I won’t go anymore, I’m bringing only corpses!” Along the way, children screamed and asked for something to drink, burnt skin stuck to the seats, and many did not survive the journey.
Cars couldn’t go up the mountain, we had to carry the wounded on ourselves,” says Marat Yusupov, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - They were carried on shirts, blankets, seat covers. I remember one guy from the village of Maisky, he was so healthy and carried about thirty people. Covered in blood, but did not stop.
Sergei Stolyarov made three trips on an electric locomotive with wounded people. At the Ulu-Telyak station, he, a driver with two months of experience, missed the 212th ambulance and went on a freight train after it. A few kilometers later I saw a huge flame. Having unhooked the oil tanks, he began to slowly drive up to the overturned cars. On the embankment, the overhead wires of the contact network, torn off by the blast wave, curled like snakes. Having taken the burned people into the cabin, Stolyarov moved to the siding and returned to the scene of the disaster with the platform already attached. He picked up children, women, men who had become helpless and loaded, loaded... He returned home - his shirt was like a stake from the clotted blood of someone else.
“All the village equipment arrived, they were transported on tractors,” recalled the chairman of the Krasny Voskhod collective farm, Sergei Kosmakov. - The wounded were sent to a rural boarding school, where their children bandaged them...
Specialized help came much later - after one and a half to two hours.
At 1.45 a.m. the control panel received a call that a carriage was burning near Ulu-Telyak, says Mikhail Kalinin, senior doctor on the ambulance shift in the city of Ufa. — Ten minutes later they clarified that the entire train had burned out. All duty ambulances were removed from the line and equipped with gas masks. No one knew where to go, Ulu-Telyak is 90 km from Ufa. The cars just went to the torch...
We got out of the car into the ashes, the first thing we saw was a doll and a severed leg... - said the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev. “I can’t imagine how many painkilling injections I had to give.” When we set off with the wounded children, a woman ran up to me with a girl in her arms: “Doctor, take it. Both the baby’s mother and father died.” There were no seats in the car, so I sat the girl on my lap. She was wrapped up to her chin in a sheet, her head was all burned, her hair was curled into baked rings - like a lamb’s, and she smelled like a roasted lamb... I still can’t forget this little girl. On the way, she told me that her name was Zhanna and that she was three years old. My daughter was the same age then. Now Zhanna should be 21, quite a bride...
We found Zhanna, who was being taken out of the affected area by the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev. In the book of memory. Zhanna Floridovna Akhmadeeva, born in 1986, was not destined to become a bride. At the age of three she died at the Children's Republican Hospital in Ufa.
Trees fell as if in a vacuum
At the scene of the tragedy there was a strong smell of corpses. The carriages, for some reason rusty in color, lay a few meters from the tracks, bizarrely flattened and curved. It’s hard to even imagine what temperature could make iron wriggle like that. It’s amazing that in this fire, on the ground that had turned to coke, where electrical poles and sleepers were uprooted, people could still remain alive!
The military later determined: the power of the explosion was 20 megatons, which corresponds to half the atomic bomb that the Americans dropped on Hiroshima,” said Sergei Kosmakov, chairman of the “Red Sunrise” village council. “We ran to the scene of the explosion—the trees were falling as if in a vacuum—to the center of the explosion. The shock wave was so powerful that glass was broken in all houses within a 12-kilometer radius. We found pieces from the carriages 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 resuscitator Vladislav Zagrebenko. — They loaded in the dark. They were sorted according to the principle of military medicine. The seriously wounded - with one hundred percent burns - are placed on the grass. There is no time for pain relief, this is the law: if you help one, you will lose twenty. When we walked through the floors of 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 anything like this, even though I worked in intensive care.
In Chelyabinsk, children from school No. 107 boarded the ill-fated train, heading to Moldova to work in a labor camp in the vineyards.
It is interesting that the head teacher of the school, Tatyana Viktorovna Filatova, even before departure, ran to the station manager to convince her that, due to safety regulations, the carriage with the children should be placed at the beginning of the train. I wasn’t convinced... Their “zero” carriage was attached to the very end.
In the morning we learned that only one platform remained from our trailer car,” says Irina Konstantinova, director of school No. 107 in Chelyabinsk. - Out of 54 people, 9 survived. Head teacher - Tatyana Viktorovna was lying on the bottom shelf with her 5-year-old son. So the two of them died. Neither our military instructor Yuri Gerasimovich Tulupov nor the children’s favorite teacher Irina Mikhailovna Strelnikova were found. One high school student was identified only by his watch, another by the net in which his parents put food for his journey.
My heart sank when the train arrived with the relatives of the victims,” said Anatoly Bezrukov. “They peered with hope into the carriages, 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, the burnt and mangled pieces of their bodies were collected - arms, legs, shoulders were collected throughout the forest, removed from the trees and placed on stretchers. By the evening, when the refrigerators arrived, there were about 20 such stretchers filled with human remains. But even in the evening, civil defense soldiers continued to remove the remains of flesh fused into the iron from the cars with cutters. In a separate pile they put things found in the area - children's toys and books, bags and suitcases, blouses and trousers, for some reason whole and unharmed, not even singed.
Salavat Abdulin, the father of the deceased high school student Irina, found her hair clip in the ashes, which he himself repaired before the trip, and her shirt.
His daughter was not on the living lists, he would recall later. “We searched for her in hospitals for three days. No traces. And then my wife and I went through the refrigerators... There was one girl there. She is similar in age to our daughter. There was no head. Black as a frying pan. I thought I’d recognize her by her legs, she danced with me, she was a ballerina, but there were no legs either...
Two mothers claimed one child at once
And in Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Samara, places in hospitals were urgently released. To bring the wounded from the Asha and Iglino hospitals to Ufa, a helicopter school was used. The cars landed in the city center in Gafuri Park behind the circus - this place in Ufa is still called the “helipad” to this day. The 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 6:58 a.m.,” said the head of the burn center in Ufa, Radik Medykhatovich Zinatullin. — From eight in the morning until lunch, there was a massive flow of casualties. The burns were deep, almost all of them had burns of the upper respiratory tract. Half of the victims had more than 70% of their bodies burned. Our center had just opened; there were enough antibiotics, blood products, and fibrin film in stock, 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 one boy had two mothers, each of whom was sure that her son was on the crib...
American doctors, as they learned, flew in from the States, made a round, and said: “No more than 40 percent will survive.” As in nuclear explosion when the main injury is a burn. We rescued 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 switched to drugs and that’s all. Like, he’s still not a tenant. And we saved him! He was one of the last to be discharged, in September.
An unbearable situation reigned at the headquarters these days. Women clung to the slightest hope and did not leave the lists for a long time, fainting right there.
The father and young girl who arrived from Dnepropetrovsk on the second day after the tragedy, unlike other relatives, were glowing with happiness. They came to see their son and husband, a young family with two children.
“We don’t need lists,” they wave it off. - We know he survived. Pravda wrote on the first page that he saved children. We know what lies in Hospital No. 21.
Indeed, the young officer Andrei Dontsov, who was returning home, became famous when he pulled children out of burning carriages. But the publication stated that the hero had 98% burns.
The wife and father shift from foot to foot, they want to quickly leave the mournful headquarters, where people are crying.
Pick it up at the morgue,” says the telephone number of Hospital No. 21.
Nadya Shugaeva, a milkmaid from the Novosibirsk region, suddenly begins to laugh hysterically.
Found it, found it!
The attendants try to smile forcefully. I found my father and brother, sister and young nephew. Found it... on the lists of the dead.
The switchmen were responsible for the disaster.
When the wind was still carrying the ashes of those burned alive, powerful equipment was driven to the site of the disaster. Fearing an epidemic due to unburied fragments of bodies smeared on the ground and beginning to decompose, they hastened to raze the scorched lowland of 200 hectares to the ground.
Builders were responsible for the death of people, for terrible burns and injuries of more than a thousand people.
From the very beginning, the investigation turned on very important people: the leaders of the industry design institute, who approved the project with violations. Deputy Minister of the Oil Industry Dongaryan was also charged, who, by his order, in order to save money, canceled telemetry - instruments that monitor the operation of the entire pipeline. There was a helicopter that flew around the entire route, it was canceled, there was a lineman - the lineman was also removed.
On December 26, 1992, the trial took place. It turned out that the gas leak from the overpass was due to a crack caused to it four years before the disaster, in October 1985, by an excavator bucket during construction work. The product pipeline was backfilled with mechanical damage. The case was sent for further investigation.
Six years later, the Supreme Court of Bashkortostan handed down a sentence - all defendants were sentenced to two years in a penal settlement. In the dock were the site manager, foreman, foremen, and builders. “Switchmen.”
Afghans worked in the morgue.
The internationalist soldiers took on the hardest work. 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 it was incredibly hot outside, the smell around the makeshift glaciers was unbearable, and flies flocked from all over the area. This work required stamina and physical strength from the volunteers; all arriving dead had to be placed on hastily put together shelves, tagged, and sorted. Many could not stand it, shuddering and vomiting.
Relatives, distraught with grief, looking for their children, did not notice anything around, peering intently at the charred fragments of bodies. Moms and dads, grandparents, aunts and uncles, had wild dialogues:
Is this not our Lenochka? - they said, crowding around a black piece of meat.
No, our Lenochka had folds on her arms...
How the parents managed to identify their own body remained a mystery to those around them.
In order not to traumatize relatives and protect them from visiting the morgue, terrible photo albums were brought to the headquarters, with pictures from different angles fragments of unidentified bodies. This terrible collection of death had pages stamped “identified.” However, many still went to the refrigerators, hoping that the photographs lie. And the guys who recently came from real war, suffering fell upon them that they had not seen while fighting with the dushmans. Often the guys provided first aid to those who fainted and were on the verge of madness from grief, or with impassive faces they helped turn over the charred bodies of their relatives.
You can’t revive the dead; 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 funny cases.
In the morning, a man came to the village council from the Novosibirsk train, with a briefcase, in a suit, in a tie - not a single scratch, said district police officer Anatoly Bezrukov. “He doesn’t remember how he got out of the train that caught fire.” I lost my way in the forest at night, unconscious.
Those who were left behind from the train showed up at headquarters.
Looking for me? - asked the guy who looked into the mournful place at the railway station.
Why should we look for you? - they were surprised there, but looked at the lists by rote.
Eat! - the young man was delighted when he found his name in the column of missing persons.
Alexander Kuznetsov went on a spree a few hours before the tragedy. He went out to drink beer, but he doesn’t remember how the ill-fated train left. I spent a day at the stop, and only when I had sobered up did I learn about what had happened. I got to Ufa and reported that I was alive. At this time, the young man’s mother methodically walked around the morgues, dreaming of finding at least something from her son to bury. Mother and son went home together.
There was no chain of command at the explosion site
Soldiers working on the tracks were given 100 grams of alcohol. It’s hard to imagine how much metal and burnt human flesh they had to shovel. 11 cars were thrown off the track, 7 of them were completely burned. People worked fiercely, not paying attention to the heat, the stench and the almost physical horror of death hovering in this sticky syrup.
What the heck did you eat? - a young soldier with an autogenous gun shouts to an elderly man in uniform.
Colonel General Civil Defense carefully lifts his foot from the human jaw.
Sorry,” he mutters in confusion and disappears into the headquarters located in the nearest tent.
In this episode, all the contradictory emotions that those present experienced: anger at human weakness in the face of the elements, and embarrassment - a quiet joy that it is not their remains that are being collected, and horror mixed with dullness - when there is a lot of death - it no longer causes violent despair.
At the scene of the tragedy, railway workers found huge sums of money and valuables. All of them were handed over to the state, including a savings book for 10 thousand rubles. And two days later it turned out that an Asha teenager had been arrested for looting. Three managed to escape. While the others were saving the living, they tore gold jewelry from the dead along with their burnt fingers and ears. If the bastard had not been locked up under serious security in Iglino, the outraged local residents would tear him to shreds. The young cops shrugged:
If only they knew that they would have to defend the criminal...
Chelyabinsk has lost its hockey hope.
The 107th school in Chelyabinsk lost 45 people near Ufa, sport Club“Traktor” is a youth hockey team, two-time national champions.
Only goalkeeper Borya Tortunov was forced to stay at home: his grandmother broke her arm.
Of the ten hockey players who were champions of the Union among regional national teams, only one survived, Alexander Sychev, who later played for the Mechel club. The pride of the team - striker Artem Masalov, defenders Seryozha Generalgard, Andrei Kulazhenkin, and goalkeeper Oleg Devyatov were not found at all. The youngest of the hockey team, Andrei Shevchenko, lived the longest of the burned guys, five days. On June 15 he would have celebrated his sixteenth birthday.
“My husband and I managed to see him,” says Andrei’s mother Natalya Antonovna. — We found him according to the lists in the intensive care unit of the 21st hospital in Ufa. “He was lying like a mummy, covered 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 named after. We wanted to christen Vishnevsky, but we didn’t have time. The doctors injected him with holy water three times through a catheter... He left us on the day of the Ascension of the Lord - he died quietly, unconscious.
The Traktor club organized a tournament a year after the tragedy, dedicated to memory dead hockey players, which has become traditional. 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, pupils of the Traktor school raised money for prizes for the tournament participants, which are traditionally awarded to the mothers and fathers of the dead children.
The explosion destroyed 37 cars and two electric locomotives, of which 7 cars burned completely, 26 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. A total of 575 people died and 623 were injured.
Train accident near Ufa- the largest railway accident in the history of Russia and the USSR (except for the crash at the Vereshchevka station in 1944, about which only fragmentary information is available) that occurred on June 4 (June 3, Moscow time) 1989 in the Iglinsky district of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, 11 km from the city of Asha (Chelyabinsk region) on the Asha - Ulu-Telyak stretch. At the moment of the oncoming passage of two passenger trains No. 211 “Novosibirsk - Adler” and No. 212 “Adler - Novosibirsk”, a powerful explosion of a cloud of light hydrocarbons occurred as a result of an accident on the nearby Siberia - Ural - Volga region pipeline. 575 people were killed (according to other sources 645), 181 of them were children, more than 600 were injured.
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Subtitles
Incident
On the pipe of the Western Siberia - Ural - Volga region product pipeline, through which a wide fraction of light hydrocarbons (liquefied gas-gasoline mixture) was transported, a narrow gap 1.7 m long. Due to a pipeline leak and special weather conditions, gas accumulated in the lowland along which the Trans-Siberian Railway passed 900 m from the pipeline, the stage Ulu-Telyak - Asha Kuibyshevskaya railway, 1710th kilometer of the highway, 11 km from Asha station, on the territory of the Iglinsky district of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.
Approximately three hours before the disaster, instruments showed a drop in pressure in the pipeline. However, instead of looking for a leak, the duty personnel only increased the gas supply to restore pressure. As a result of these actions, a significant amount of propane, butane and other flammable hydrocarbons leaked out through an almost two-meter crack in the pipe under pressure, which accumulated in the lowland in the form of a “gas lake.” The ignition of the gas mixture could have occurred from an accidental spark or a cigarette thrown from the window of a passing train.
The drivers of passing trains warned the train dispatcher of the section that there was heavy gas pollution on the stretch, but they did not attach any importance to this.
The force of the explosion was such that the shock wave broke glass in the city of Asha, located more than 10 km from the scene of the incident. The column of flame was visible more than 100 km away. 350 m of railway tracks and 17 km of overhead communication lines were destroyed. The fire caused by the explosion covered an area of about 250 hectares.
The explosion damaged 37 cars and 2 electric locomotives, of which 7 cars were to the point of exclusion from inventory, 26 were burned out from the inside. The impact of the shock wave led to the derailment of 11 cars. An open longitudinal crack with a width of 4 to 40 cm and a length of 300 m formed on the slope of the roadbed, causing the slope part of the embankment to slide down to 70 cm. The following were destroyed and put out of action: the rail-sleeper grid - for 250 m; contact network - over 3000 m; longitudinal power supply line - for 1500 m; automatic blocking signal line - 1700 m; 30 contact network supports. The length of the flame front was 1500-2000 m. A short-term rise in temperature in the explosion area reached more than 1000 °C. The glow was visible for tens of kilometers.
The crash site is located in a remote, sparsely populated area. Providing assistance was very difficult due to this circumstance. 258 corpses were found at the site, 806 people received burns and injuries of varying severity, of which 317 died in hospitals. A total of 575 people died and 623 were injured.
Pipeline
After the accident near Asha, the pipeline was not restored and was liquidated.
Versions of the accident
The official version states that the gas leak from the product pipeline was possible due to damage caused to it by an excavator bucket during its construction in October 1985, four years before the disaster. The leak began 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. 2-3 weeks before the explosion, a microfistula formed, then, as a result of cooling of the pipe, a crack that grew in length appeared at the point of gas expansion. Liquid condensate soaked the soil at the depth of the trench, without coming out, and gradually went down the slope to the railway.
When the two trains met, possibly as a result of braking, a spark occurred, which caused the gas to detonate. But most likely the cause of gas detonation was an accidental spark from under the pantograph of one of the locomotives.
Consequences
On the afternoon of June 4, the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR M. S. Gorbachev and members of the government commission arrived at the scene of the explosion. Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR G. G. Vedernikov was appointed chairman of the commission to investigate the Ufa explosion. In memory of those killed, a one-day mourning was declared in the country on June 5.
The trial lasted for six years, nine officials were charged, two of them were subject to amnesty. Among the rest are the head of the construction and installation department of the Nefteprovodmontazh trust, foremen, and other specific performers. The charges were brought under Article 215, Part II of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. The maximum penalty is five years in prison.
An Association of victims and relatives of those killed near Asha was created.
Eyewitness accounts
Gennady Verzyan, resident of Asha (11 kilometers from the explosion):
At two o'clock in the morning local time, a bright glow shot up from the direction of Bashkiria. The column of fire flew up hundreds of meters, then a blast wave came. The roar caused glass to break out in some houses.
Alexey Godok, in 1989, first deputy head of the passenger service of the South Ural Railway:
When we flew over the scene of the accident, it seemed as if some kind of napalm had gone through. The trees were left with black stakes, as if they had been stripped from root to top. The carriages were scattered, scattered...
This must happen - the train that came from Novosibirsk was 7 minutes late. If he had passed on time or if they had met in another place, nothing would have happened. The tragedy is this - at the moment of the meeting, a spark passed from the braking of one of the trains, gas accumulated in the low area and an instant explosion occurred. Rock is rock. And our carelessness, of course...
I worked at the scene of the accident, together with the KGB and the military, studying the causes of the disaster. By the end of the day, June 5, we knew that this was not sabotage at all, it was a wild accident... Indeed, the smell of gas was felt by both the residents of a nearby village and our drivers... As the check showed, the gas accumulated there for 20-25 days. And all this time there were trains going there! As for the product pipeline, it turned out that there was no control there, despite the fact that the relevant services are obliged to regularly monitor the condition of the pipe. After this disaster, instructions appeared for all our drivers: if they smell gas, they should immediately warn and stop train traffic until the circumstances are clarified. Such a terrible lesson was needed...
Vladislav Zagrebenko, in 1989 - resuscitator at the regional clinical hospital:
At seven in the morning we took off with the first helicopter. It took three hours to fly. They didn’t know where to sit at all. They put us near the trains. From above I saw (draws) such a clearly defined circle with a diameter of about a kilometer, and black stumps of pine trees stick out like matchsticks. There is taiga all around. There are carriages, bent like bananas. There are helicopters there like flies. Hundreds. By that time there were no sick people or corpses left. The military did a perfect job: they evacuated people, took away the corpses, and put out the fire.
The sick were brought in on dump trucks, on trucks side by side: alive, not so alive, not at all alive. They loaded it in the dark. They were sorted according to the principle of military medicine. The seriously wounded - 100 percent of burns - on the grass. There is no time for pain relief, this is the law: if you help one difficult patient, you will lose twenty.
I especially want to say about the Ashino residents. Each patient had a volunteer on duty, but you couldn’t get so many nurses, and there was still a queue to take this place. They carried cutlets, potatoes, everything the wounded asked for... It is known that these patients need to drink a lot. But I couldn’t imagine so many compotes: all the window sills were covered, the entire floor. The area in front of the building was filled with volunteers. All of Asha rose to help.
Salavat Abdulin, father of Lena Abdulina, who died near Asha, co-chairman of the Association of relatives of those killed and injured near Asha:
At the station we were told that the last carriages in which our children were traveling were not damaged. Someone said that teacher Tulupov, who went with them, called and said that everything was fine. They simply reassured us.
At six in the evening we went by special train to Asha, from Asha to Ufa. The daughter was not on the list of living ones. We spent three days searching in hospitals. No traces. And then my wife and I went through the refrigerators...
There was one girl there. She is similar in age to my daughter. There was no head, only two teeth stuck out from below. Black as a frying pan. I thought I would recognize her by her legs, she danced with me, she was a ballerina, but there were no legs up to her torso. And she was similar in body. I then reproached myself, it was possible to tell by my blood type and by my collarbone, which I broke in childhood... In that state it didn’t dawn on me. Or maybe it was her... There are a lot of unidentified “fragments” of people left. […]
24 people from our school were not found at all, 21 people died. 9 people survived. Not a single teacher was found.
Valery Mikheev, deputy editor of the newspaper "Steel Spark", Asha:
I was woken up - and I had just laid down - by a flash of terrible brightness. There was a glow on the horizon. A couple of tens of seconds later, a blast wave reached Asha, breaking a lot of glass. I realized that something terrible had happened. A few minutes later I was already at the city police department, together with the guys I rushed to the “duty room” and rushed towards the glow. What we saw is impossible to imagine even with a sick imagination! The trees burned like giant candles, and the cherry-red carriages smoked along the embankment. There was an absolutely impossible single cry of pain and horror from hundreds of dying and burned people. The forest was burning, the sleepers were burning, people were burning. We rushed to catch the rushing “living torches,” knock the fire off them, and bring them closer to the road and away from the fire. Apocalypse... And how many children there were! Paramedics began to arrive after us. We put the living on one side and the dead on the other. I remember carrying a little girl, she kept asking me about her mother. I handed it over to a doctor I know - let’s bandage it! He replies: “Valerka, that’s it already...” - “How is that all, I was just talking?!” - “It’s shocking.”
From the first days of its existence, the railway became a source of increased danger. Trains hit people, collide with each other and derail. However, on the night of June 3-4, 1989, a train accident occurred near Ufa, the likes of which had no analogues in either Russian or world history. However, then the cause of the accident was not the actions of railway workers, nor damage to the tracks, but something completely different, far from the railway - an explosion of gas leaking from a pipeline passing nearby.
Train accident near Ufa on the night of June 3-4, 1989
An object: 1710 kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway, section Asha - Ulu-Telyak, Kuibyshev Railway, 11 km from Asha station, Iglinsky district of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. 900 meters from the Siberia-Ural-Volga region product pipeline (pipeline).
Victims: 575 people were killed (258 at the scene of the accident, 317 in hospitals), 623 people were injured. According to other sources, 645 people died
Causes of the disaster
We know exactly what caused the train accident near Ufa on June 4, 1989 - a massive explosion of gas that leaked from the pipeline through a 1.7-meter-long crack and accumulated in the lowland along which the Trans-Siberian Railway passes. 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 flared up from an accidental spark that slipped between the pantograph and the contact wire, or in any other component of the electric locomotives. But it is possible that the gas exploded from a cigarette (after all, there were many smokers on the train with 1284 passengers, and some of them could have gone out to smoke at one in the morning), but most experts are inclined to the “spark” version.
As for the reasons for gas leaks 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 damage site. According to this version, a crack in the pipeline opened just 40 minutes before the accident, and during this time quite a lot of gas accumulated in the lowland.
Because this version became official, the pipeline builders were found guilty of the accident - several officials, foremen and workers (seven people in total).
According to another version, the gas leak began much earlier - two to three weeks before the disaster. First, a microfistula appeared in the pipe - a small hole through which gas began to leak. Gradually the hole widened and grew into a long crack. The appearance of the fistula is probably caused by corrosion resulting from an electrochemical reaction under the influence of “stray currents” from the railway.
It is impossible not to note several other factors that are in one way or another connected with the occurrence of an emergency. First of all, standards 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 repurposed as a product pipeline for transporting liquefied gas-gasoline mixture. This could not be done, since the operation of product pipelines with a diameter of over 400 mm is prohibited by all regulations. However, this was ignored.
According to experts, this terrible accident could have been avoided. A few days later, drivers of locomotives passing along this stretch reported increased gas pollution, but these messages were ignored. Also, on this section of the pipeline, a few hours before the accident, the gas pressure dropped, but the problem was solved simply by increasing the gas supply, which, as is now clear, only worsened the situation. As a result, no one found out about the leak, and soon there was an explosion.
It’s interesting that there is also a conspiracy theory about the causes of the disaster (where would we be without it!). Some “experts” claim that the explosion was nothing more than a sabotage by American intelligence 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, ignoring technical problems, bureaucracy and basic negligence - that’s real reasons train accident near Ufa on the night of June 3-4, 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 increased gas pollution, which, in his opinion, posed a danger. It was approximately ten o'clock in the evening local time. However, the message was either ignored by dispatchers, or simply did not have time to reach the responsible officials.
IN 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, as is known, is the most destructive type of chemical explosion. The gas ignited in its entire volume at once, and in this fireball the temperature momentarily rose to 1000 degrees, and the length of the flame front reached almost 2 kilometers.
The disaster occurred in the taiga, far from large settlements and roads, so help could not come quickly. The first to come to the scene of the accident were the residents of the village of Asha, located 11 km away, the residents of Asha, and subsequently 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 scene of the disaster - the first to begin work were the soldiers of the civil defense battalion, and then the rescue train crews joined them. The military evacuated the victims, cleared away the rubble, and restored the tracks. The work went quickly (fortunately, in early June the nights are light and dawn comes early), and by morning the only evidence of the accident was the scorched forest within a kilometer radius and scattered carriages. All the victims were taken to Ufa hospitals, and the remains of the victims were recovered during the day on June 4 and transported by car to Ufa morgues.
Complete work to restore the tracks (after all, this is the Trans-Siberian Railway, its stop is at long time 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 relatives and friends in the burned fragments of the bodies...
Consequences
By different estimates, the force of the explosion ranged from 250 - 300 (official version) to 12,000 tons of TNT equivalent (remember that dropped on Hiroshima atomic bomb 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 broke glass in many houses in the village of Asha 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 carriages were burned out, many of them were crushed, some of the carriages were missing their roofs and trim. And several carriages were bent like bananas - it is difficult to imagine how powerful the explosion was to throw multi-ton carriages off the road in an instant and thus cripple them.
The explosion started a fire that engulfed an area of over 250 hectares.
The ill-fated pipeline was also damaged. The decision was made not to restore it, and it was soon liquidated.
The explosion claimed 575 human lives, of which 181 were children. Another 623 people were seriously injured and left disabled various categories. 258 people died on the spot, but no one can claim that these are exact numbers: people were literally torn apart by the explosion, their bodies mixed with earth and twisted metal, and most of the remains discovered were not bodies, but only mutilated fragments of bodies. And no one knows how many dead remained under the hastily restored railway track.
Another 317 people died in hospitals in the days following the accident. Many people suffered burns over 100% of the body, 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 there was a monstrous explosion, there is taiga and silence, broken by passing freight and passenger trains. However, electric trains traveling 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-tall monument you can see several road signs that were torn from the carriages during the explosion.
Warn and prevent
One of the causes of the disaster was a violation of operating standards for product pipelines - there were no leakage monitoring sensors on the pipe, and no visual inspection was carried out by linemen. But something else was more dangerous: along its length, the pipeline had 14 dangerous approaches (less than 1 kilometer) and intersections with railways and roads. The problematic pipeline was dismantled, but the problem was not solved - 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 made 15 years after the accident: in 2004, on the instructions of OJSC Gazprom, a system for monitoring the crossings of main pipelines across roads (SKP 21) was developed, which has been implemented on the roads since 2005. pipelines of Russia.
And now we can only hope that modern automation will prevent a catastrophe like the Ufa one from happening again.
There is still debate about the cause of the explosion. Perhaps it was an accidental electrical spark. Or maybe someone’s cigarette acted as a detonator, because one of the passengers could well have gone out at night to smoke...
But how did the gas leak occur? 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 due to constant stress. It opened only about 40 minutes before the accident, and by the time the trains passed through, 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. Seven people were held responsible, including 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 leak. Gradually it expanded into a crack.
By the way, drivers of trains passing this section reported about gas pollution several days before the accident. A few hours before, the pressure in the pipeline dropped, but the problem was solved simply - they increased the gas supply, which further aggravated the situation.
So, most likely, the main cause of the tragedy was elementary negligence, the usual Russian hope for “maybe”...
They did not restore the pipeline. It was subsequently liquidated. And at the site of the Ashinsky disaster in 1992, a memorial was erected. Every year, relatives of the victims come here to honor their memory.