A fire killed at least 62 people Tuesday when it swept through a nursing home in southern Russia where a night watchman ignored two alarms and only reported the blaze after he saw flames, emergency officials said.
It took firefighters nearly an hour to get from the nearest sizable town to the facility in the Azov Sea coast village of Kamyshevatskaya, where there is no fire station, authorities said.
A total of 62 people were killed and 35 were injured, said Sergei Petrov, a duty officer at the Emergency Situations Ministry’s southern branch. He said there were 97 people in the two-story brick building when the fire broke out, including four employees.
The devastating nighttime fire came less than 24 hours after a methane gas blast at a Siberian coal mine killed at least 97 people in Russia’s deadliest mining disaster in a decade.
Emergency workers were alerted about the fire shortly after 1 a.m. and headed for the scene from Yeisk, a town about 22 miles away, arriving nearly an hour later, Petrov said. The fire was put out at about 5 a.m., he said.
Staff shortage
A fire alarm system that had not been fully installed signaled three times, but a watchman — at the facility but outside the building — ignored the first two alarms and reported the fire only after he saw flames, said Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Veronika Smolskaya.
In addition, nursing home personnel were absent from their posts when the fire broke out, slowing efforts to find keys and open an emergency exit, she said. Most of the victims probably died from smoke inhalation, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
The staff inside the building when the fire broke out — three orderlies and a nurse — was not enough to quickly evacuate the elderly residents, Smolskaya said. NTV television reported that the nurse was among the dead.
Authorities were considering carelessness, a short circuit and arson as possible causes of the fire, Sergei Kudinov, the head of the Emergency Situations Ministry’s southern branch, said on NTV. Petrov said a faulty electrical wire may have been the cause.
It 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.
A fire at a Moscow drug treatment facility in December killed 45 women who were trapped behind locked gates and barred windows. A blaze a day later killed nine patients at a clinic for the mentally ill in Siberia.
Russia's deadly fire record
Russia records nearly 18,000 fire deaths a year, several times the per capita rate in the United States and other Western countries.
Last year, according to the Emergency Situations Ministry, an average of just under 600 fires were recorded daily, killing a total of 17,650 people in the nation of 142 million — down nearly 7 percent from 2005 but still working out to almost 50 fire deaths every day.
Over the past year, the ministry has published lists of dozens of buildings, including medical facilities and schools, where glaring fire safety violations endangering lives were discovered. Many have been corrected, it says.
The ministry said that two inspections of the nursing home in Kamyshevatskaya last year uncovered 30 fire safety violations, and that 24 of them had been corrected.
State-run Channel One television reported that the facility had recently been renovated and a new fire alarm system installed.