“The ground was sifted in search of bodies.” Eyewitnesses recall the Ashinsky tragedy. The largest railway accident in the USSR near the city of Asha

Today we will talk about the largest railway accident near Ufa, on the Asha-Ulu-Telyak section, in 1989.

“The train accident near Ufa is the largest in the history of Russia and the USSR, which occurred on June 4 (June 3, Moscow time) 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 section.

At the moment of the oncoming passage of two passenger trains No. 211 “Novosibirsk - Adler” and No. 212 “Adler - Novosibirsk”, a powerful explosion of a cloud of light hydrocarbons occurred as a result of an accident on the nearby Siberia - Ural - Volga region pipeline. 575 people were killed (according to other sources 645), 181 of them were children, more than 600 were injured.

On June 4, 1989, at 01:15 local time (June 3 at 23:15 Moscow time), at the moment of the meeting of two passenger trains, a powerful volumetric gas explosion thundered and a gigantic fire broke out.”

People had already gone to bed, many were undressed... the carriages were filled with passengers. There were many children and schoolchildren traveling on the trains. Therefore, after the explosion, many, even the survivors, were undressed... To say that people and children were in a state of shock is to say nothing... The children with 90% of body burns, being in shock, regretted that they had not reached the sea, asked to give something to my mother, they asked where the watch was, what was on my hand, where was the toy... and five minutes later they died. The adults did not understand what was happening, they thought that a war had started, they were bombing, and were hiding in the forest. They were afraid of repeated blows.

Parents considered it lucky, no matter how blasphemous it may sound, if they found the body of a child, because many parents whose children were traveling alone (schoolchildren, teenagers) were given simply fragments of clothes, bodies, or nothing... some never found the missing ones.

Residents of nearby houses set up infirmaries in their houses, windows were broken in the houses, the walls were splattered with blood, stained with ash, and saturated with smoke. Eyewitnesses say that they swept fingers and fragments of bodies from houses where they were brought by the blast wave. The explosion was so powerful.

In total, 1,284 passengers (including 383 children) and 86 members of train and locomotive crews traveled on the trains.

At least 575 people died (more than 1,000 people were injured - on the platform as well, 623 were left disabled), but it is clear that there were more, since many of the dead remained missing, their ashes scattered in the night air of a random village.

That is, a few of those caught up in that ill-fated tragedy remained safe and relatively unharmed, mainly those who survived received varying degrees of damage and remained disabled.

Eyewitnesses spoke of a black mushroom rising into the sky after the explosion, of scorched forests kilometers away from the disaster... of hundreds of fragments of burnt human bodies, of children dying without help.

Home mechanical cause the explosion was called damage to the gas pipeline by an excavator bucket (as a result of an accumulated cloud of gas and a spark from the close movement of two trains, an explosion occurred), the “switchmen” were found, they were imprisoned for a couple of years, then they were released on probation...

The personnel on duty, having noticed a decrease in pressure in the gas pipeline several hours before the disaster (even freight train drivers more than once reported to dispatchers about heavy gas pollution in this section), instead of looking for a leak, they increased the pressure even more, and a lot of gas accumulated in the pocket of the section. The fire could have started from a cigarette thrown out the window.

Among the political versions, sabotage and a terrorist attack were again considered, all with the same goals as during the 1988 tragedy in Arzamas (provocations of the West, undermining the country’s authority). After all, it is impossible to believe in mysticism when tragedies occur on the same day a year apart... It is unlikely that this is a coincidence.

But whatever the political goals, the fact of the carelessness of the staff on duty and service workers is again obvious. We will never know what exactly was the reason, but the human factor played a fatal role in this tragedy - this is obvious.

There is still debate about the cause of the explosion. Perhaps it was an accidental electrical spark. Or maybe someone’s cigarette acted as a detonator, because one of the passengers could well have gone out at night to smoke...

But how did the gas leak occur? By official version, during construction in October 1985, the pipeline was damaged by an excavator bucket. At first it was just corrosion, but over time a crack appeared due to constant stress. It opened only about 40 minutes before the accident, and by the time the trains passed through, a sufficient amount of gas had already accumulated in the lowland.

In any case, it was the pipeline builders who were found guilty of the accident. Seven people were held responsible, including officials, foremen and workers.

But there is another version, according to which the leak occurred two to three weeks before the disaster. Apparently, under the influence of “stray currents” from the railway, an electrochemical reaction began in the pipe, which led to corrosion. First, a small hole formed through which gas began to leak. Gradually it expanded into a crack.

By the way, drivers of trains passing this section reported about gas pollution several days before the accident. A few hours before, the pressure in the pipeline dropped, but the problem was solved simply - they increased the gas supply, which further aggravated the situation.

So, most likely, the main cause of the tragedy was elementary negligence, the usual Russian hope for “maybe”...

They did not restore the pipeline. It was subsequently liquidated. And at the site of the Ashinsky disaster in 1992, a memorial was erected. Every year, relatives of the victims come here to honor their memory.

In June 1989, the largest train accident. Two trains collided on the Ufa-Chelyabinsk section. As a result, 575 people were killed (181 of them children) and another 600 people were injured.

At approximately 00:30 am local time, a powerful explosion was heard near the village of Ulu-Telyak - and a column of fire rose 1.5-2 kilometers upward. The glow was visible 100 kilometers away. IN village houses glass flew out of the windows. The blast wave felled the impenetrable taiga along the railway at a distance of three kilometers. Hundred-year-old trees burned like big matches.

A day later, I flew in a helicopter over the scene of the disaster, and saw a huge black spot, like a napalm-scorched spot, more than a kilometer in diameter, in the center of which lay carriages twisted by the explosion.

...

According to experts, the equivalent of the explosion was about 300 tons of TNT, and the power was comparable to the explosion in Hiroshima - 12 kilotons. At that moment, two passenger trains were passing there - “Novosibirsk-Adler” and “Adler-Novosibirsk”. All passengers traveling to Adler were already looking forward to a vacation on the Black Sea. Those who were returning from vacation were coming to meet them. The explosion destroyed 38 cars and two electric locomotives. The blast wave threw another 14 cars off the tracks downhill, “tying” 350 meters of tracks into knots.

...

As eyewitnesses said, dozens of people thrown out of trains by the explosion rushed along the railway like living torches. Entire families died. The temperature was hellish - the victims still wore melted gold jewelry (and the melting point of gold is above 1000 degrees). In the fiery cauldron, people evaporated and turned into ashes. Subsequently, it was not possible to identify everyone; the dead were so burned that it was impossible to determine whether they were a man or a woman. Almost a third of the dead were buried unidentified.

In one of the carriages were young hockey players from Chelyabinsk “Traktor” (team born in 1973) - candidates for the USSR youth team. Ten guys went on vacation. Nine of them died. In another carriage there were 50 Chelyabinsk schoolchildren who were going to pick cherries in Moldova. The children were fast asleep when the explosion occurred, and only nine people remained unharmed. None of the teachers survived.

What actually happened at kilometer 1710? The Siberia - Ural - Volga gas pipeline ran near the railway. Gas flowed through a pipe with a diameter of 700 mm high pressure. A gas leak occurred from a rupture in the main (about two meters), which spilled onto the ground, filling two large hollows - from the adjacent forest to the railway. As it turned out, the gas leak began there a long time ago; the explosive mixture accumulated for almost a month. Local residents and drivers of passing trains spoke about this more than once - the smell of gas could be felt 8 kilometers away. One of the drivers of the “resort” train also reported the smell on the same day. These were his last words. According to the schedule, the trains were supposed to pass each other in another place, but the train heading to Adler was 7 minutes late. The driver had to stop at one of the stations, where the conductors handed over to the waiting doctors a woman who had gone into premature labor. And then one of the trains, descending into the lowland, slowed down, and sparks flew from under the wheels. So both trains flew into a deadly gas cloud, which exploded.

By some miracle, having overcome the impassability, two hours later 100 medical and nursing teams, 138 ambulances, three helicopters arrived at the scene of the tragedy, 14 ambulance teams, 42 ambulance squads worked, and then just trucks and dump trucks evacuated the injured passengers. They were brought “side by side” - alive, wounded, dead. There was no time to figure it out; they loaded it in pitch darkness and haste. First of all, those who could be saved were sent to hospitals.

People with 100% burns were left behind - by helping one such hopeless person, you could lose twenty people who had a chance to survive. Hospitals in Ufa and Asha, which took the main load, were overcrowded. American doctors who came to Ufa to help, seeing the patients of the Burn Center, stated: “no more than 40 percent will survive, these and these do not need to be treated at all.” Our doctors managed to save more than half of those who were already considered doomed.

The investigation into the causes of the disaster was conducted by the USSR Prosecutor's Office. It turned out that the pipeline was left virtually unattended. By this time, due to economy or negligence, pipeline overflights were canceled and the position of lineman was abolished. Nine people were eventually charged, with a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison. After the trial, which took place on December 26, 1992, the case was sent for a new “investigation.” As a result, only two were convicted: two years with deportation outside of Ufa. Trial, which lasted 6 years, consisted of two hundred volumes of testimony from people involved in the construction of the gas pipeline. But it all ended with the punishment of the “switchmen”.

An eight-meter memorial was built near the site of the disaster. The names of 575 victims are engraved on the granite slab. Here, 327 urns with ashes rest. Pine trees have grown around the memorial for 28 years - in the place of the previous ones that died. The Bashkir branch of the Kuibyshev Railway built a new stopping point - “Platform 1710 kilometer”. All trains going from Ufa to Asha make a stop here. At the foot of the monument lie several route boards from the cars of the Adler - Novosibirsk train.

On the night of June 3-4, 1989, on the Asha-Ulu-Telyak railway section not far from Ufa, due to a pipeline break, there was a crowd of trains on the route of trains. a large number of highly flammable gas-gasoline mixture. 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. In less than two years before the accident near Ufa, four events occurred one after another. serious accidents on the railways, 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 high-speed train The Aurora, traveling along the route Moscow - Leningrad, 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 were carried out precisely in the area where the leak later occurred, leading to the 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. What was a gross violation of the instructions, which required a mandatory check of the integrity of the area where the renovation work. 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

Frame from documentary film"Highway". 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 service staff, who was working that evening, didn’t 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 was no immediate area settlements Moreover, there were forests around, which made it difficult for vehicles to pass 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 his best. high level up to 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. 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 most major disaster in the history of domestic railways. Its victims were almost as many people as died during the entire existence of railways in Russian Empire(over 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 clear 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. 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 terrible disaster near Ufa during this time faded into the background.

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 influence high temperature outside (it was thirty degrees Celsius at the time), about 70% of the liquid hydrocarbons that managed to leak out of the pipe went into 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. 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 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, everyone alive had already been taken to medical institutions 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 an icon with me. big size. 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 came with their instruments, consumables, even then they had disposable syringes, but we still continued to boil the syringes... For the first 10 days after the disaster, all the doctors in the center worked extremely hard, 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.