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Nursing home fire claims scores of elderly in Russia

Residents look at a nursing home some hours after a fire swept through the building in Kamyshevatskaya, Russia, yesterday. PHOTO: AP

A fire swept through a nursing home in southern Russia yesterday, killing 62 people -- a toll that authorities said was inflated by safety violations, toxic materials, negligence and the long distance from the nearest firehouse.

A night watchman ignored two fire alarms before reporting the blaze and it took firefighters nearly an hour to get from the nearest sizable town to the nursing home in the Azov Sea coast village of Kamyshevatskaya, where the fire station was closed last year, emergency officials said.

Many of the nursing home's elderly residents could not escape on their own and some knocked on windows seeking aid, according to news reports and a local resident who said he helped evacuate people from the two-story brick building.

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

Thirty-five people were injured in the blaze, regional emergency official Sergei Petrov said. There were 97 people in the building when the fire broke out, including four employees, he said. The Krasnodar region's acting governor, Murat Akhedzhak, said 30 people were hospitalized and that their lives were not in danger.

Firefighters were alerted to the blaze shortly after 1am and headed for the scene from Yeisk, a town on the other side of a peninsula, arriving nearly an hour later and extinguishing the fire by about 5am, Petrov said. The fire station is 52km from the nursing home, said Sergei Kudinov, the head of the Emergency Situations Ministry's southern branch.

The fire was the latest in a number of deadly blazes at schools, dormitories, hospitals and other state-run facilities that have plagued Russia in recent years, underlining rampant violations of fire safety rules and official negligence.

In many cases, the victims have been vulnerable people such as children, the elderly or wards of the state. A fire at a Moscow drug treatment facility in December killed 45 women trapped by gates and barred windows, and a blaze a day later killed nine patients at a Siberian clinic for the mentally ill.

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

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