“The ground was sifted in search of bodies.” Eyewitnesses remember the Asha tragedy
On the night of June 3-4, 1989, on the Asha-Ulu-Telyak railway section not far from Ufa, due to a pipeline break, a large amount of flammable gas-gasoline mixture accumulated on the train route. As two passenger trains passed each other in opposite directions, a random spark triggered a violent explosion. Almost 600 people died.
With the beginning of the perestroika era in the USSR, the number of serious disasters and accidents increased sharply. Every few months, one or another terrible event occurred, claiming many lives. In just a few years, two nuclear submarines sank, the steamship Admiral Nakhimov sank, there was an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, an earthquake in Armenia, and railway accidents followed one after another. There was a feeling that both technology and nature rebelled at the same time.
But often it was not the failure of technology that led to irreparable consequences, but the human factor. The most common sloppiness. It was as if the responsible employees no longer cared about all the job descriptions. Less than two years before the accident near Ufa, four serious accidents on the railways occurred one after another, causing considerable casualties. On August 7, 1987, at the Kamenskaya station, a freight train accelerated too much, was unable to brake and crushed a passenger train standing at the station, resulting in the death of more than a hundred people. Cars of train No. 237 Moscow - Kharkov, which crashed at the Elnikovo station in the Belgorod region.
The cause of the disaster was a gross violation of instructions by several employees. 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", traveling along the Moscow - Leningrad route, crashed due to the gross negligence of the road master. 31 people died. In October 1988, a freight train crashed and exploded in Sverdlovsk, killing 4 people and injuring more than 500. Human factors 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 terrible 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 to transport 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. Repurposing for transportation of the mixture required replacement of pipes. But due to the reluctance to spend money on replacing the already installed highway, they did not change anything.
Although the pipeline passed through populated regions and crossed several railway lines, 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 was monitoring the pipeline at all, because they were sorry for the money. The high authorities decided that it was much cheaper not to waste effort and money on diagnosing problems, but to shift it onto the shoulders of local residents. They say that concerned residents will report a leak, then we will work, but let everything go as it goes, why spend money on it.
After the pipeline began operating, it suddenly became clear that someone had overlooked something and the pipeline was built in violation of the rules. On one of the three-kilometer sections, the pipe ran less than a kilometer from a populated area, which was prohibited by the instructions. As a result, we had to make a detour. Excavation work was carried out precisely in the area where a leak later occurred, leading to an explosion.
Excavation work on the site was carried out using excavators. During the work, one of the excavators damaged the pipe, which no one noticed. After installing the bypass, the pipe was immediately buried. Which was a gross violation of the instructions, which required a mandatory check of the integrity of the area where repair work was carried out. The workers did not check the site for strength, and the management also did not control their work. The work acceptance certificate was signed without looking at it, without any inspections of the site, which was also unacceptable.
It was on 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
Still from the documentary "Magistral". 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 21:00 pm, pipeline operators received a message from the Minnibaevsky gas processing plant about a sharp drop in pressure in the pipeline and a decrease in the flow rate of the mixture.
However, the service personnel working that evening did not bother. Firstly, the control panel was still located 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 missing the bus, so he did not leave any instructions for the shift workers, saying only that the pressure had dropped in one of the sections and they needed to “turn up the gas.”
The operators who started the night shift increased the pressure. The leak appears to have been there for a long time, but the damage to the pipe was minor. However, after increasing the pressure, new damage occurred in the problem area. As a result of the damage, a gap of almost two meters in length was formed.
Less than a kilometer from the leak site, one of the sections of the Trans-Siberian Railway passed through. 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 area into a fiery inferno.
During these three hours, while the gas accumulated near the main line, trains passed through the area repeatedly. Some drivers reported to the dispatcher about heavy gas pollution in the area. However, the railway dispatcher did not take any measures, since he did not have contact with the pipeline operators, and at his own peril and risk did not dare to slow down traffic along the Trans-Siberian Railway.
At this time, two trains were moving towards each other. One was going from Novosibirsk to Adler, the other was returning in the opposite direction, from Adler to Novosibirsk. In fact, their meeting at this site was not scheduled. But the train traveling from Novosibirsk was unexpectedly delayed at one of the stops due to the fact that one of the pregnant passengers went into labor.
Accident
At about 1:10 minutes on June 4 (in Moscow it was still late evening on June 3), two trains met at the station. They were already beginning to disperse when a powerful explosion was heard. Its power was such that the column of flame was observed tens of kilometers from the epicenter. And in the city of Asha, located 11 kilometers from the explosion, almost all the residents were awakened, as the blast wave broke the glass in many houses.
The explosion site was in a difficult to reach area. There were no populated areas in the immediate vicinity, and there were forests all around, which made it difficult for vehicles to travel through. Therefore, the first teams of doctors did not arrive immediately. In addition, according to the recollections of the doctors who were the first to arrive at the scene of the disaster, they were shocked because they did not expect to see anything like this. They were on a call to a fire in a passenger carriage and were prepared for a certain number of casualties, but not for the apocalyptic picture that appeared before their eyes. One would have thought that they were in the midst of an atomic bomb explosion.
The power of the explosion was about 300 tons of TNT. Within a radius of several kilometers, the entire forest was destroyed. Instead of trees, there were flaming sticks sticking out of the ground. Several hundred meters of the railway track were destroyed. The rails were twisted or missing altogether. Electrical poles were knocked down or severely damaged within a radius of several kilometers from the explosion. There were things lying everywhere, elements of carriages, smoldering scraps of blankets and mattresses, fragments of bodies.
There were a total of 38 cars in the two trains, 20 in one train and 18 in the other. Several carriages were mangled beyond recognition, the rest were engulfed in flames both outside and inside. Some of the cars were simply thrown off the tracks onto the embankment by the explosion.
When the monstrous scale of the tragedy became clear, all doctors, firefighters, police officers, and soldiers were urgently called from all settlements in the surrounding area. Local residents also followed them, helping in any way they could. The victims were taken by car to hospitals in Asha, from where they were transported by helicopter to clinics in Ufa. The next day, specialists from Moscow and Leningrad began arriving there.
Both trains were “resort” trains. The season had already begun, people with whole families were traveling south, so the trains were crowded. In total, there were more than 1,300 people on both trains, 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 heading 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, between 575 and 645 people died. This spread is explained by the fact that separate tickets were not issued for small children at that time, so the death toll could be higher than the officially announced 575 people. In addition, there could be hares on the train. Tickets for “resort” trains sold out quickly and not everyone had enough, so there was an unspoken practice of traveling in the conductors’ compartment. Of course, for a certain fee to the conductors themselves. Almost a third of the dead, 181 people, were children. Of the ten Traktor hockey players traveling in the trailer car, only one young man survived. Alexander Sychev received serious burns to his back, but was able to recover, return to sports and perform at the highest level until 2009.
More than 200 people died directly on the spot. The rest died in hospitals. More than 620 people were injured. Almost all received serious burns, many were left disabled. Only a few dozen lucky people managed to survive without being seriously injured.
Consequences
On the afternoon of June 4, Mikhail Gorbachev arrived at the scene of the disaster, accompanied by members of the government commission to investigate the accident, headed by Gennady Vedernikov. The Secretary General stated that the disaster was possible due to the irresponsibility, disorganization and mismanagement of officials.
This was already a period of glasnost, so this disaster, unlike many others, was not kept silent and was covered in the media. In terms of its consequences, the accident near Ufa became the largest disaster in the history of domestic railways. Its victims were almost as many people as died during the entire existence of railways in the Russian Empire (more than 80 years).
At first, the version of a 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 determined what exactly caused the explosion: a cigarette butt thrown out of the train window or an accidental spark from the current collector 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 bring all the culprits to justice, regardless of their merits. At first it really seemed that the persecution of the “switchmen” would not be possible. The investigation was of interest to very high-ranking officials, right up to Deputy Minister of Oil Industry Shahen Dongaryan.
During the investigation, it became clear that the pipeline was left virtually 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 abandoned; no one really looked after it.
As often happens, we started out very vigorously, but then things stalled. Soon, various kinds of political and economic cataclysms associated with the collapse of the USSR began, and the disaster gradually began to be forgotten. The first court hearing 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 direction and high-ranking persons disappeared from among those involved in the case. And the main accused were not those who operated the pipeline in violation of basic safety requirements, but the workers who repaired the section.
In 1995, six years after the tragedy, a new trial took place. The defendants included the workers of the repair team who made the diversion at the site, as well as their superiors. All of them were found guilty. Several people were immediately amnestied, the rest received short sentences, but not in a camp, but in a colony-settlement. The lenient sentence went almost unnoticed. Over the past six years, many disasters have occurred in the country, and the terrible disaster near Ufa has faded into the background during this time.
27 years ago, one of the worst railway accidents occurred at 1710 km of the Trans-Siberian Railway. According to various estimates, the tragedy claimed the lives of 575 to 645 people, among them 181 children, 623 people were left disabled. AiF-Chelyabinsk restored the chronology of events and listened to the stories of eyewitnesses.
19:03 (local time)
In 2016, 29 people – friends and relatives of the victims – will travel 1,710 km to the memorial. A special train will take them to the platform.
Fast train No. 211 Novosibirsk - Adler departed from Chelyabinsk.
The train arrived in Chelyabinsk an hour and a half late. At the Chelyabinsk-Glavny station, car No. 0, in which students from school No. 107 and the Traktor 73 youth hockey team were traveling, is hitched to the rear of the train, while according to safety regulations, the car with the children should be at the head of the train. The train has a total of 20 carriages.
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 traffic is not stopped; it was decided to deal with the problem in the morning.
23:41
Fast train No. 212 Adler - Novosibirsk departs from Ufa. The train was delayed by more than an hour when it arrived in Ufa. Consisting of 17 carriages.
0:51
Fast train No. 211 arrives at Asha station. The train traveled to Asha at courier speed, and the delay behind the schedule was only 7 minutes. But here the train stayed longer than expected: one of the little passengers developed a fever.
1:05
Fast train No. 212 proceeded to the Ulu-Telyak station along a side track, overtaking a freight train with oil products.
1:07
The pressure in the pipeline drops. Under the influence of high temperatures outside (it was thirty degrees at the time), about 70% of the liquid hydrocarbons that managed to leak out of the pipe turned into a gaseous state. The mixture turned out to be heavier than air, it began to fill the depression.
1:13
Two trains enter a dense white cloud. The railway found itself in the very center of a continuous zone of gas contamination (the total area of the zone is about 250 hectares).
1:14
An explosion occurs. Presumably, a spark from the current collector of one of the locomotives leads to detonation of the gas mixture. A fire starts. The voltage disappears from the contact network and the railway alarm goes off. The explosion was so strong that the skins of passenger cars were scattered over a distance of 6 km, and windows in houses were broken within a radius of 12 km from the epicenter.
The explosion threw the carriages off the tracks. Photo: Photo from dloadme.net
“My cousin, the same age, was visiting his grandmother in the village of the Criminal Code of the Ashinsky District, about 6-7 km as the crow flies to the site of the tragedy. At the entrance to her house there was an oak door with a powerful forged hook. She always put it on a 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 13 years old at the time,” says AiF reader Alexey.
1:20
Local residents begin to come to the aid of passengers. They transport people to Asha in carts, cars, and buses.
1:45
A call comes to console 03 of the ambulance service in Ufa: “A carriage is on fire in Ulu-Telyak!” Preparation of places in hospitals in Ufa and Chelyabinsk begins. It soon becomes known that almost the entire crew has burned out. Ambulances have difficulty making their way to the scene of the tragedy, guided by the huge glow of the fire, which can be seen tens of kilometers away.
2:30
The first fire crews and ambulances from nearby settlements begin to arrive at the scene of the explosion. Local residents help doctors dismantle the bodies of the dead and wounded.
5:00
Firefighting and recovery trains arrive at 1710 km. But they could not immediately begin repairing the canvas. The fire was still going on all around.
“I lived in Zlatoust, at that time I had just completed my training as an assistant electric locomotive driver and was a freelance correspondent for the newspaper. Early in the morning I was woken up with a request to go to the scene of the disaster and collect information about the Zlatoust residents who were traveling on these trains. The first thing I saw on the spot was a fallen and burnt forest. The smell of burning and ash in the air. I went down the mountain to the railway tracks through this burnt forest. Under the mountain, where the tracks used to be, there was a mess of trains,” recalls Yuri Rusin.
7:00
By this time, all the living had already been taken to the medical institutions of the Ulu-Telyak station, Ashi, village. Iglino, Katav-Ivanovsk. From there, the heaviest were sent to Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Samara, and Moscow by helicopter. The explosion site has been cordoned off.
It’s difficult to talk about what and how it was there,” says Yuri Rusin. - Helicopters landed and took off constantly. There were a lot of people in hospitals looking for their loved ones. The lists were incomplete and changes were constantly being made. Some victims were unable to say their name, or had difficulty pronouncing it, and doctors wrote it down with errors. But the worst thing was when the person’s data was on the lists of the living, loved ones sighed with relief, and after some time they received the terrible news of death. And at the same time, the military was working at the scene of the accident, sifting the earth to find the remains of human bodies.
8:00
There is a call on the radio to donate blood. First of all, those who survived burn disease were accepted; their blood was the most valuable. Doctors recall that the residents of Asha alone 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 all this happened. And I had to apply everything that I learned in medical school, practically in combat conditions. This day, 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. I then worked in the emergency room of hospital No. 6. Usually, if about forty people come for a shift, about 120 people came in that day. When I arrived at the emergency room, I heard that the burn center was being reared up and everyone was being discharged... We realized that some kind of disaster had happened, but nothing specific was known yet. Then it was decided that all burn patients would be collected in one place, and in this seven-story medical building of the 6th hospital they began to vacate all departments and all rooms. Essentially, this entire building was turned into one large burn center,” recalls Mikhail Korostelev, plastic surgeon, combustiologist, doctor of the highest category.
16:00
The fire was finally extinguished, all sources were extinguished. Work has begun on restoring the railway track.
21:00
New rails were hastily laid. The first trains started running along the Asha - Ulu-Telyak section.
“I spent more than three days at the scene of the tragedy, but I was not tired. At the headquarters at the scene of the disaster I was offered to fly to Chelyabinsk. We flew by two helicopters. One was a girl, the other was a boy, they were evacuated to a burn center. We landed at the airport and there were a lot of ambulances. Unfortunately, one of the children died 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 her somewhere? The answer was simple: “Just take it, and you’ll figure it out yourself.” This icon was at my home for three months, then something prompted me, and I handed it over to the church under construction in Chrysostom,” - Yuri Rusin says.
A memorial has been erected at the site of the tragedy, where relatives of the victims come every year. Photo: Official website of HC "Traktor"
“I remember a team of English doctors arrived: surgeons, anesthesiologists, psychiatrists. They worked, as they say, to their full potential: they performed operations, participated in rounds, and on duty. They arrived with their instruments, consumables, 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 tirelessly, with only a break 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 gradually settled down, and all the inspectors left. In August they began to repair the departments in this building, and at the end of September the last victims were discharged,” - Mikhail Korostelev shares his memories.
“About a week or two after the explosion, my parents and I were traveling by train in the morning. It was terribly scary. Hectares of scorched earth. The train stopped and beeped for a long time. It became scary because of the scale of the tragedy. All the people in the carriage fell silent,” our reader Alexey will recall.
© wikimapia.org
© Photo from the site young.rzd.ru
© wikimapia.org
© Photo from dloadme.net
© Photo from the site www.chuchotezvous.ru
© AiF / Photo by Alexander Firsov
© AiF / Photo by Alexander Firsov
© AiF / Photo by Alexander Firsov
© AiF / Photo by Alexander Firsov
© AiF / Photo by Alexander Firsov
© AiF / Photo by Alexander Firsov
© AiF / Photo by Alexander Firsov
© AiF / Photo by Alexander Firsov
© AiF / Photo by Alexander Firsov
©
Two train accidents, united by the date June 4th and separated by a period of one year. None of them received an explanation of the exact cause of what happened.
The first claimed the lives of 91 people, including 17 children. About 800 people were injured. 1,500 people were affected, 823 of them were left homeless. In the second, 575 people died (according to other sources, 645), 181 of them were children, and more than 600 were injured. What was it? We have collected probable versions, possible causes and eyewitness accounts in one article. As usually happened in the USSR, the leadership did everything to keep silent, misrepresent and confuse people.
Arzamas railway accident
Almost three decades have passed since the Arzamas tragedy, when, according to the official version, a train with explosives exploded almost in the center of the city, killing about a hundred people, leaving thousands of citizens homeless. The people of Arzamas survived, the destruction was eliminated, roads and houses were restored. But from the memory of eyewitnesses of the tragedy you cannot erase a single moment of that summer day.
Saturday morning, June 4, 1988, did not foretell anything bad. It was just hot - the temperature went over 40 degrees. The freight train was crossing the crossing at a low speed - 22 kilometers per hour. And suddenly - a powerful explosion. Three carriages flew into the air, containing 120 tons of explosives, as newspapers wrote then, intended for geologists, miners and builders.
What caused the explosion has not yet been established. There were attempts to place the blame on the railway workers: they say that the explosion occurred on the rails, which means the transport workers are to blame. However, experienced experts have not confirmed this. There are other versions left. Including spontaneous combustion of explosives due to violation of loading rules, gas leakage from a gas pipeline laid under the railway tracks. According to technical conditions, the gas pipeline should lie under the tracks at a depth of at least five meters, but it turned out to be laid at a depth of only one and a half meters.
Ivan Sklyarov (who later became governor) then, in 1988, was the chairman of the Arzamas city executive committee, and it was he who was responsible for eliminating the consequences of the explosion. He said that the tragedy is primarily connected with politics. Those who eliminated the consequences of the disaster recall that there could have been much more victims then. This is evidenced by two facts. Firstly, a few minutes before the explosion, another train with ammunition left the station. Secondly, what everyone pays attention to is that there was an oil depot a kilometer from the crossing. If the explosion had occurred three minutes later, half the city would have been destroyed. This is how newspapers wrote about the tragedy in those days.
From the official: On June 4, 1988 at 9.32, when approaching the Arzamas-1 station of a freight train traveling from Dzerzhinsk to Kazakhstan, an explosion occurred in three cars with 18 tons of industrial explosives intended for mining enterprises in the south of the country. The tragedy claimed the lives of 91 people, including 17 children. About 800 people were injured. 1,500 families were affected, 823 of them were left homeless. 250 meters of the railway track, the railway station and station buildings, and nearby residential buildings were destroyed. The gas pipeline running under the railroad bed was seriously damaged. Electrical substations, high-voltage lines, distribution networks, and water supply systems are out of order. There were 160 industrial and economic facilities in the affected area. Two hospitals, 49 kindergartens, 69 shops, nine cultural facilities, 12 enterprises, five warehouses and bases, and 14 schools were damaged to varying degrees. The explosion destroyed and damaged 954 residential buildings, of which 180 were beyond repair.
Bang kids
Only strong people worked at its epicenter. On June 4, 1988, Arzamas resident Sasha Sukonkin was only two months old. He lost his father and mother overnight. They were left alone with their sister in the care of their grandmother, who worked as a postman. One thought did not leave the elderly woman: “If only I could raise my grandchildren, if only I could put them on their feet...” She raised, as they say, very good people, Sasha is studying at a university, his sister is also an independent person, she already has her own family in which she is growing up Small child.
Maria Afanasyevna Shershakova is happy for them. Now she is retired, but then, 20 years ago, as the head of the letters and complaints department of the city committee of the CPSU, she found herself in the very epicenter of human pain and grief. She connected the grandmother with her grandchildren. She hugged a fifteen-year-old girl, who kept repeating: “Please call the hospital, maybe dad is there...” And she didn’t dare tell her that she had to look for dad at the morgue; it was already known that he was riding in a car with other builders to a country children's camp, he definitely died. At that time, the girl’s mother was suffering from a heart attack, and her older brother had to be called from the army to identify her father... She helped the Yamov family, which had lost both adults and children, to reunite...
There were many people like Maria Afanasyevna in Arzamas at the tragic moment in its history. By coincidence, an explosion occurred in Arzamas in 1988. But we will probably never be immune from such man-made disasters. Moreover, with the increasing deterioration of the country’s technical fleet, and, to be honest, with our irresponsibility, the danger is only increasing. This means that we need to be reminded of the sad events in Russian history, although life still triumphs...
Train accident near Ufa
The largest railway accident in the history of Russia and the USSR occurred on June 4, 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 occurred. 575 people were killed (according to other sources 645), 181 of them were children, more than 600 were injured.
A train accident, the likes of which the world has never known, occurred in Bashkiria on the night of June 3-4, 1989. Fast trains No. 211 and No. 212 18 years ago should not have met at the ill-fated 1710th kilometer, where a gas leak occurred on the product pipeline. The train from Novosibirsk was late. Train No. 212 Adler - Novosibirsk was rushing towards us at full speed.
The official version goes like this. 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 figure it out...
On the Asha-Ulu-Telyak stretch near 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 an embankment.
The clock found in the ashes showed 1.10 local time. The 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 names were not put on tickets, there could have been a huge number of “hares” traveling to the blessed south and returning back.
“Flames shot up into the sky, it became as bright as day, we thought, we dropped an atomic bomb,” says Anatoly Bezrukov, a local police officer at the Iglinsky Department of Internal Affairs, 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 hands, by the 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, asked for something to drink, burnt skin stuck to the seats, and many did not survive the journey.
“The cars didn’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, such a healthy man, 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.
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, flattened and bent. 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 found out 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.
“The daughter was not on the lists of survivors,” he will 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...
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 victims. 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 in the crib... Two mothers claimed one child at once.
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 phone 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. The builders were responsible for the death of people, for the terrible burns and injuries that more than a thousand people received.
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 occurred 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.”
In 1989, such a structure as the Ministry of Emergency Situations did not exist. Typewritten lists of the dead, deceased and survivors at the headquarters were updated hourly (!), although no computers existed, and over a thousand victims were scattered throughout all the hospitals of the republic. Death from burns occurs within a few days, and a real pestilence began in clinics in the first week after the tragedy. The mother could call from the airport and receive information that her son was alive, and, upon reaching the headquarters, find the name already on the list of the dead. It was necessary not only to record the death of a person who often could not even say his name, but also to organize the sending of the coffin to his homeland, having found out all the data of the deceased.
Meanwhile, planes from all over the then huge country with relatives of the victims landed at the Ufa airport; they needed to be accommodated somewhere and soldered with valerian. All the surrounding sanatoriums were filled with unhappy parents who searched for their children in the morgue for several days. Those who were “luckier” and their relatives were identified were met by doctors at the stations and within a few hours they flew to their hometown on a plane specially organized for them.
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 photographs from different angles of fragments of unidentified bodies placed on the pages. 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 had recently come from a real war were subjected to suffering that they had not seen while fighting 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.
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.
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 - quiet joy that it is not their remains that are being collected, and horror mixed with stupefaction - when there is a lot of death - it no longer causes violent despair.
Chelyabinsk has lost its hockey hope. The 107th school in Chelyabinsk lost 45 people near Ufa, and the Traktor sports club lost its 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?”
The Traktor club, a year after the tragedy, organized a tournament dedicated to the memory of the deceased hockey players, which became 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.
575 (according to other sources 645) people died, 657 received burns and injuries. The bodies and ashes of those burned alive were taken to 45 regions of Russia and 9 republics of the former Union.
UFA, June 4 - RIA Novosti, Ramilya Salikhova. It was the ambulance doctors who had the main job of rescuing passengers from 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 appeared, a huge cloud of gas had accumulated here, which leaked from the damaged Western Siberia - Ural - Volga gas pipeline, located 900 meters from the 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, making it 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 delivered people that there was the shortest path to all 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, 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. The deputy chief physician of the ambulance, Ramil Zainullin, who arrived at the workplace, opened the warehouses with potent drugs, and all the victims received painkillers almost at the scene. It helped that the warehouses Civil defense had 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 a certain number of people to burn hospitals in other cities. We organized the flight of planes from Ufa to Moscow, Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), Samara, Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg), Leningrad. The victims were accompanied on the road by ambulance doctors, 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”. Here, as in other medical universities in Russia, future doctors are 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.
When two trains - “Novosibirsk-Adler" and "Adler-Novosibirsk" - were passing nearby, the gas that had accumulated in the lowland exploded. According to official data, 575 people were killed. A quarter of a century later, eyewitnesses of the tragedy remember this day.
MET YOUR FUTURE WIFE IN THE HOSPITAL
Sergei Vasiliev was 18 in 1989. He worked as an assistant driver of the Novosibirsk-Adler train. After the events near Ulu-Telyaq he was awarded the Order “For Personal Courage”:
In three days I had to go to the army. Perhaps I would have been sent to Afghanistan. At least that's what I thought. There was no foreboding of trouble that day. We rested in Ust-Katav, hitched the train and returned home. The only thing I noticed was the bad fog that was spreading across the ground.
After the explosion, I woke up on the floor, and everything was burning there. The driver was pinned in the cab. I started to pull him out, and he was a healthy, heavy man. As I later found out, he died in the hospital on the sixth day. As soon as I pulled it out, I saw that the door was blocked by bars - I somehow managed to get it out.
We got out. I thought my driver wouldn’t be able to get up - he was all burned, he could barely move... But he got up and walked away! State of shock. I had 80% burns, all that was left on my body were shoulder straps, a belt and sneakers without soles.
In one of the carriages, a grandmother and five grandchildren were going to the sea to relax. She hits the window, she can’t break it - double. I helped her, broke the glass with a stone, she gave me three grandchildren. Three survived, and two died there... My grandmother also remained alive, she later found me in the hospital in Sverdlovsk.
The first thing I thought then was that the war had begun, that it was a bombing. When I found out that the cause of the explosion was someone’s negligence, I was so angry... It hasn’t let me go for 25 years. I spent almost three months in the hospital, where they pieced me together again, piece by piece. It was in the hospital that he met his future wife. Then he tried to work again as an assistant driver. I was able to endure it for a year: as soon as the train approached this place, my blood pressure immediately jumped. I couldn't. He transferred and became an inspector. That's how I still work.
“A PILE OF ASH, AND IN THE MIDDLE IS A TIE CLIP. THERE WAS A SOLDIER"
The district police officer of the Krasny Voskhod village, Anatoly Bezrukov, was 25. He saved seven people from burning cars and helped take the victims to hospitals.
First there was one explosion, then a second. If there is a hell, then it was there: you climb out of the darkness onto this embankment, there is a fire in front of you and people are crawling out of it. I saw a man burning with a blue flame, the skin hanging on his body in rags, a woman on a branch with her stomach ripped open. And the next day I went to the site for work and began collecting material evidence. Here lies the ashes, all that is left of the man, and in the middle a tie pin shines - that means there was a soldier. I wasn't even afraid. No one could be more afraid than those who traveled on these trains. There was a smell of burning there for a very long time...
“A LOT OF PEOPLE – AND EVERYONE IS ASKING FOR HELP”
Krasny Voskhod resident Marat Yusupov is now 56 years old. On the day of the disaster, Marat saved four people from the carriage and loaded the cars with “severe” victims.
There was no forest left at all around these trains, but it was dense. All the trees fell down, just black stumps. The earth was scorched to the ground. I remember many, many people, everyone asking for help, complaining about the cold, although it was warm outside. They took off all their clothes and gave them to them. I was the first to carry a little girl, I don’t know if she’s alive...
RED GAZERBOARDS AT THE SITE OF BURNED CARS
Sergey Kosmatkov, head of the Krasny Voskhod village council:
Everyone says that there were 575 dead, in fact - 651. They just couldn’t identify them, only ashes and bones remained. Two days after the fire, workers came to lay new rails directly on the remains. People then stood up like a wall, collected everything in bags and buried it right next to the tracks. And three years later we erected an obelisk here. It symbolizes two melted rails and at the same time a female profile. There are also bright red gazebos near the road. They were installed in places where completely burnt-out carriages lay. Relatives gather there and remember.
HOW IT WAS
Important facts about the disaster
✔ On the night of June 4, 1989, at the 1710th kilometer of the Asha-Ulu-Telyak section, almost on the border with the Chelyabinsk region, two trains met: Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk. The explosion occurred at 01.14 - multi-ton carriages were scattered through the forest like splinters. Of the 37 cars, seven burned completely, 26 burned out from the inside, 11 were torn off and thrown off the tracks.
✔ This meeting should not have happened. But one train was late due to technical problems, and a woman who began to give birth was disembarked from the second.
✔ According to official data, there were 1,284 people on two trains, but in those years names were not written on tickets, “hares” easily infiltrated, children under five years old traveled without tickets at all. Therefore, there were most likely more people. The lists of the dead often contain the same names - families were traveling on vacation and back.
✔ There was a gas pipeline at a distance of a kilometer from the railway; it was built four years before the tragedy. And, as it turned out during the investigation, with violations. The gas pipeline ran through a lowland, among the forest, and the railway runs along a high embankment. A crack appeared in the pipe, gas gradually began to accumulate in the valley and creep towards the trains. What served as the detonator is still unknown. Most likely, an accidentally thrown cigarette butt from the vestibule or a spark from under the wheels.
✔ By the way, a year before this incident, there had already been an explosion on this pipe. Several workers died then. But no measures were taken. For the death of 575 people, the “switchmen” - the workers who served the site - were punished. They were given two years in prison.
