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.
PHOTO: AP
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.
also see story:
Search continues after 97 die in Siberian mine blast
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique