Explosion near Ufa: chronology of the largest railway disaster in the USSR
On the night of June 3 to 4, 1989, two passenger trains ran towards each other along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Train No. 211 was carrying vacationers from Novosibirsk to Adler, train No. 212 was returning them back. June 4 at 01:14 local time (June 3, 23:14 Moscow time) both trains passed each other on the 1710th km of the Kuibyshev Railway - on the stretch between the Ulu-Telyak stations and the 1712 kilometer platform, 11 km from the city of Asha in the Chelyabinsk region. All details about the scale of the disaster and its consequences can be found in the Izvestia article.
Chronicle of the tragedy
At that moment, there was an explosion of monstrous force. Five Soviet seismic stations recorded a 3.5 magnitude earthquake. Experts later estimated the power of the explosion at 7-9 kt in TNT equivalent, five times less than during the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, but the precipitation of hydrocarbons covering a huge area made the destruction comparable. The speed of the shock wave was 770 m/s, twice as fast as the speed of sound. It was enough to knock out windows in the houses of Asha, located 10-11 km from the epicenter.
All 37 carriages of both trains and electric locomotives caught fire. 11 wagons derailed, seven of them completely burned out immediately, the rest — from the inside. Criminologists will later establish that the temperature inside the skeletons rose to 1.2 thousand degrees and lasted for at least 10 minutes: the handles of all compartments melted and dripped down. The flames rose to a height of about 200 m, century-old trees fell within a radius of 3 km, and 250 m of railway track turned into a pile of metal.
Passenger Natalia K.
"I woke up because I fell from the second shelf to the floor — and everything was already on fire. It seemed to me that I was seeing some kind of nightmare: the skin on my arm was burning and sliding off, a child was crawling under my feet, engulfed in fire, a soldier with empty eye sockets was coming at me with outstretched arms, I was crawling past a woman who couldn't put out her own hair, and there were no shelves or doors in the compartment anymore, no windows."
There were 1,284 passengers and 86 railway workers on two trains that night. 575 people were officially killed, including 181 children. According to other sources, the number of victims reached 841 — the exact list of passengers simply did not exist: railway tickets were then sold without passport data, and the conductors often took "left-handed" passengers. About 300 more survivors have lost their ability to work for a long time or permanently.
The scale of the disaster and the rescue operation
Residents of the nearby village of Sredny Kazayaki were the first to come to the rescue: the blast wave blew out the windows in their houses, they jumped out into the street — and saw the glow and burned people. The villagers began to pull out the injured and carry them to their homes.
The editor of the Ashinsky newspaper "Steel spark" Mikheev
"What we saw is impossible to imagine, even with a sick imagination! Trees burned like giant candles, cherry-red wagons 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 on fire, the sleepers were on fire, people were on fire. We rushed to catch the rushing "live torches", knock down the fire from them, carry them closer to the road away from the fire. The apocalypse."
Sergey Stolyarov, the driver of the freight train following the same run, unhooked the locomotive and returned to the crash site three times during the night.
"By the second arrival, the adults gathered the children and loaded them to us on blankets brought by the locals. Surprisingly, the children did not cry, although many of their bodies were burned to the bone. I asked one girl where her mom was, and she said, "Mom's gone—I saw her burning."
During the night, Stolyarov took out about 400 wounded. He had nightmares for many years after that.
The last of the victims was hospitalized five and a half hours after the disaster, a high figure even by today's standards. 45 ambulance crews were working at the site, 17 of them specialized. 1.2 thousand military personnel, 45 helicopters and 138 ambulances participated in the evacuation; officers and cadets of the Ufa Aviation School were alerted at 03:50 (00:50 Moscow time).
Intensive care specialist V. Zagrebenko told:
"Every patient had a volunteer on duty, but you can't get that many nurses, and there was also a queue to take this place. They were carrying cutlets, potatoes, everything that the wounded asked for... It is known that these patients need to drink a lot. But I couldn't imagine such a large number of compotes: all the window sills were covered, the whole floor. The square in front of the building was filled with volunteers. All of Asha rose to help."
Even criminals in Ufa prisons voluntarily donated blood. The tragedy resonated all over the world. American doctors and nurses from Sam Houston arrived in Ufa, and specialists from the UK arrived in Chelyabinsk. Japan, France, Sweden, Germany and Cuba sent their help.
Investigation: from terrorist attack to negligence
The initial version of the investigation was a terrorist attack — in the late 1980s, the situation in the country was tense, just the day before, thousands of people held a rally in Ufa demanding the republic's secession from the USSR. However, experienced investigators quickly realized that the terrorists had nothing to do with the disaster.
According to the investigators, the truth turned out to be "even worse than a terrorist attack" — systemic, long-term negligence. The Western Siberia – Ural–Volga Region pipeline, commissioned in 1985 to transport associated gas from Siberia to the European part of the country, passed 900 m from the railway. During its design, the pipe diameter was exceeded — 720 mm instead of the permissible 500 mm, and the danger of proximity to the highway was ignored.
But the events of October 1985 played a decisive role. The workers arbitrarily dug up an already accepted pipe on the western slope of Snake Mountain and shifted it to the eastern one, so as not to resettle the nearby village — such a settlement was envisaged by the original project, but deprived the brigade of bonuses for saving. During the re-laying, the pipe was grazed by the bucket of a Japanese KATO excavator. An oblique crack with a diameter of 18 microns has formed, thinner than a human hair. The shifted area was not tested under pressure and was not properly insulated from corrosion.
On the fateful night, a microscopic crack suddenly became through— perhaps due to the vibration of a passing freight train. About 2 thousand tons of liquefied associated gas escaped into the air in 10-12 minutes through a gap 2 m long and 50 cm wide. Wide fractions of volatile hydrocarbons are heavier than air: They flowed down the mountainside to the railway embankment, forming an explosive cloud up to 5 m high.
The pipeline operators noticed a drop in pressure in the pipe, but instead of stopping the gas supply, they increased the pressure, thereby increasing the volume of the dangerous cloud. The drivers of both trains smelled the smell even before the explosion and informed the dispatcher, but traffic on the highway was not stopped. At 01:09 (23:09 Moscow time), the electric locomotive of train No. 212 entered the cloud. The driver managed to radio in: "I'm entering a cloud of strange fog up to the height of a pantograph." After 10 seconds, the mixture of air and gas reached the electric motor, and a spark ignited the entire volume. The trial lasted for six years.
Alexander Egorov, a senior prosecutor and criminologist at the Prosecutor's Office of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, who directly investigated the disaster, recalled:
"We have checked and rechecked all the versions put forward by builders, operators and railway workers. They drove tractors, beat excavators, put them in pits and took them out. And gradually all versions were refuted, except for one: the damage was caused by the reverse bucket of the Japanese excavator KATO, which was used in laying the pipeline."
Seven people were brought to justice. Four were granted amnesty in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Victory, one was acquitted. Two of them, Alexander Kurbatov, head of the linear engineering and technical service, and Viktor Kurochkin, head of SMU—1, received two years each in a penal colony with suspended sentences. Both were pardoned by Bashkiria's president Murtaza Rakhimov in 1997.
Effects
After the tragedy, the ZSUP pipeline was decommissioned. Since the mid-2000s, sections of oil and gas pipelines near railways in Russia have been equipped with safety control systems. Drivers are required to stop the train when they smell gas or gasoline, a rule that did not exist in 1989.
Immediately after the explosion near Ufa, railway tickets to the USSR began to be sold using a passport so that rescuers and investigators would always have an accurate passenger list. Before that, several dozen people remained among the dead, who could not be identified: the bodies burned completely, there were no genetic examinations at that time.
The head of train No. 212, Eldar Farzaliyev, suffered burns to 25% of his body, managed to save several passengers and was awarded the Order of the Badge of Honor. As soon as he recovered, he was the first of the surviving railroad workers to return to work.
"Everyone tried to persuade me not to ride trains anymore, they hinted that after this you would not be able to become a train boss again, a phobia and the like. But it had the opposite effect on me.: I decided to prove to everyone that I'm not afraid, I can do it."
The identification of the dead made the incident particularly difficult. The bodies were taken to a temporary site near a meat processing plant in Ufa, where four forensic medical experts and investigators worked. First, the relatives were shown photos, then clothes and things, and only then the body itself. Egorov recalled one episode that he has not forgotten to this day: "A man entered the cars at the identification site of the victims — tall, statuesque, with jet-black hair. He was looking for his wife and two children, whom he had sent on vacation. When this man got off the train 10 minutes later, I didn't recognize him: he was practically white."
Volunteer Rimma Buranbayeva, who helped relatives of passengers
"For me, since then, the color of death is not mourning black, but ash-gray. That's exactly what it was like on the 1710th km - the forest, the land, and the wagons from the outside and inside."
Memorial
A year after the disaster, in 1990, a memorial was opened at the site of the tragedy. At the foot of the eight—meter monument, 327 urns with ashes of the dead are buried - those who could not be identified or whose bodies were not claimed by relatives. Next to the monument, you can see the wayside signs torn off by the explosion.
Especially for the convenience of relatives, the 1710 Kilometer bus stop was opened near Snake Mountain, directly opposite the memorial. Trains stop there twice a day. An asphalt branch with a parking lot leads to the monument from the Ufa–Asha highway.
By order of the Ministry of Railways, passing trains should give a long horn at the memorial. The tracks destroyed by the explosion have long been restored, and trains are again passing through the 1710th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Whether they honk in honor of the dead depends only on the memory of the driver.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
